
Class '^ J^' 

Book_ 

GopyrightN? 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



TO THE READER: 

The following Part, complete in itself is nozu published, and 
in this form, in advafice of the other three Parts of the proposed 
volume, with an intent to facilitate the success of an existing 
project to raise a public memorial, in the city of New York, to 
Alexander Hamilton, by diffusing in this way a more 
popular and a full knowledge of the man, his genius, and the 
scope of his labors. 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON 



^/7 



A HISTORICAL STUDY 



HONORABLE GEORGE SHEA 

CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE MARINE COURT 




NEW YORK 

PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON 

BOSTON: H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY 

CambriUffe : ®()c Eiberfitte JPrecs 
1877 






Copyright, 1877, 
By GEORGE SHEA. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BV 

;i. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 




ESSAY TO DELINEATE THE TIMES AND GENIUS 

OF 

ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

IS INSCRIBED TO THE 

LORD HOUGHTON, 

SCHOLAR, POET, STATESMAN, MASTER OF THE ENGLISH TONGUE, 

IN REMEMBRANCE OF PLEASANT SOCIAL HOURS, 

AND 

IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS WARM KINDRED FEELINGS TOWARD 

MY COUNTRY. 



PART I. 

THE INDIVIDUAL, 



^ 



PART I. 

THE INDIVIDUAL. 

More than three-score years and ten have 
passed since Alexander Hamilton died. Men 
then thought and spoke of his death as untimely 
for himself and his country. History will give no 
such judgment. For himself, for his peace of 
mind and the simple grandeur of his fame, the 
time of his death must be esteemed fortunate ; 
for the Republic, now as we look back upon the 
course of events, the sacrifice appears to have been 
desirable. He was not doomed to outlive his use- 
fulness ; nor to live into those days when doctrines 
which he feared and opposed, and when personal 
solicitation for office, were to gain ascendency in 
the administration of the government. Nor was his 
heart to be embittered, as many others have been, 
by ephemeral contentions, in which the honors of 
his pitched and decisive battles might be dimmed 
and degraded.^ He had laid the foundation, broad 

^ "Jefferson and Madison were brought forward by caucus nom- 
inations The first year [1821] of Mr. Monroe's second 

term had scarcely passed away before the political atmosphere be- 



8 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

and deep, of a republic for the people. He had 
secured, by potential constitutional bulwarks, the 
frame of its government from the changes and 
chances of ordinary mutability, decay, and violent 
revolution. It was, by its written word, self-ad- 
justing and self-remedial. It contained, within it- 
self, the means of improvement, derived from the 
Confederation, but now made practicable and vital ; 
and, like the adaptive nature of the common law, 
capable of falling in with each phase in the prog- 
ress of true civilization and national expansion. 
Revolution by force was to be without excuse 
henceforth. The winds and the waves may now 
come and beat upon the house. It was not built 
in the sands of an ever shifting popular feeling, 
but on the fixed and durable rock of a constitu- 
tional Republic. A " fierce democratic " meant, in 
his understanding, as enlightened by the philoso- 
phy taught by historical examples, license, not law, 
and ultimate anarchy : a republic meant that " dem- 
ocratic " under the regulation of a supreme law. 

This discriminating idea concerning a form of 
pure republican government was one entertained, 
at that early day, by a few forward men, who 
seem to have been unwilling to openly proclaim it. 

came inflamed to an unprecedented extent. The republican party, 
so long in the ascendant, and apparently so omnipotent, was lit- 
erally shattered into fragments, and we had no fewer than five 
republican presidential candidates in the field." — President Van 
Bttren's Political Parties, p. 3. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 9 

Mirabeau ventured once, and only once, to utter 
the thought ; and then at that private meeting of 
friends, so fatal in its immediate consequences to 
himself and to France. Lafayette, " too republican 
for the genius of his country," was denounced in 
the National Assembly, his arrest decreed, and 
emissaries sent to carry the decree into effect. 
The annihilation of the constitutional party and 
the commencement of the Reign of Terror, were 
concurrent events. Hamilton was unresei'ved in all 
places where discussion was appropriate. Never 
untimely intrusive, yet, when he spoke, it was fully 
and without reserve. He acted under the influence 
of opinions which had been honestly formed, and 
in the correctness of which he confided to the end ; 
opinions which, he hoped, would in the sequel 
prove acceptable to the majority, but to which he 
felt it his duty to adhere, whatever might be the 
consequence to himself of his perseverance. That 
he favored a monarchy is an absurd prejudice. If 
he had favored it he knew quite well that a com- 
monwealth was the old beaten highroad that leads 
to royalty.^ Many too sincerely believed that he 

1 Napoleon III. observed and spoke of the familiar " tendency of 
the democracy to personify itself in one man." Franklin declared, 
in the Constitutional Convention, that there is " a natural inclina- 
tion " in the masses of mankind to kingly government, " as it gives 
more the appearance of equality among citizens ; and that they 
like." — Madison^ s Debates, vol. 2, p. 773. 

The emperor, in a conversation with Colonel Vaudrey, related in 



lO ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

did ; and suspicion detected as proof that which 
reason should place to a different account. He 
knew human nature better than to attempt to su- 
perinduce upon American civilization, peculiar 
and sensitive as it was, a system already rejected, 
and alien to the genius of its origin and develop- 
ment.^ To be sure, the war for independence was 
an assertion and vindication of the rights claimed 
by the colonists as British subjects. The denial 
of those rights by a British ministry was officially 
avowed as the adequate cause for resistance, and, 
when persisted in, of final complete separation 
from the crown.^ The object of the Revolution 

the preface to the English edition of his Idees JVapoleoitiennes, 
said : " France is democratic, not repubhcan. By democracy, I 
mean the government of an individual by the will of all ; by a re- 
public, I mean the government of a number, in obedience to a cer- 
tain system." 

1 "The idea," writes Hamilton, "of introducing a monarchy or 
aristocracy into this country, by employing the influence and force 
of a government, continually changing hands, towards it, is one of 
those visionary things that none but madmen could meditate, and 
that no wise man will believe." — Hamilton's Works, vol. 4, p. 271. 

2 In the closing pages of his autobiography, Mr. Jefferson tells 
us that he called upon Franklin in Philadelphia in 1790, and only a 
few weeks before his death (which occurred April 17, 1790), when 
Franklin placed in Jefferson's hands a full account of his negoti- 
ations with the British ministry in London, through Lord Howe. 
" I remember," continues Jefferson, " that Lord North's answers 
were dry, unyielding in the spirit of unconditional submission, and 
betrayed an absolute indifference to the occurrence of a rupture ; 
and he said to the mediators, at last, that ' a rebellion was not to 
be deprecated on the part of Great Britain ; that the confiscations 
it would produce would provide for many of their friends.' This 



THE INDIVIDUAL. II 

was to uphold and continue, not to prostrate and 
destroy, those principles of free government and 
that jurisprudence which were their inheritance, 
and constituted their cherished state-household. 
As Macaulay says of the English Revolution of 
1688, an event which these colonists ever regarded 
with respect, " in almost every word and act may 
be discerned a profound reverence for the past." 
But it was the principles of English constitutional 
liberty, and not the hereditary monarchy, which 
held their profound reverence ; — the principles of 
that revolution, so accurately described by the 
same brilliant writer, and which "of all revolu- 
tions the least violent, has been of all revolutions 
the most beneficent. It finally decided the great 
question whether the popular element which had, 
ever since the age of Fitzwalter and De Montfort, 
been found in the English polity, should be de- 
stroyed by the monarchical element, or should be 
suffered to develope itself freely, and to become 
dominant."-^ Hamilton, and the Nationalists of 
that period who followed his lead, knew that a 
commonwealth or a Cromwellian era was alike 
not to the purpose of settling for their country a 
beneficial, competent, and permanent government. 

expression was reported by the mediators to Franklin, and indi- 
cated so cool and calculated a purpose in the ministry as to render 
compromise hopeless, and the negotiation was discontinued " — 
Jefferson's Works, vol. i (Washington edition). ' 
^ History of England, vol. 2, p. 464. 



12 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

A commonwealth was no government: it was a 
thing to be governed. An executive that is good 
for anything cannot be included as a part of a 
government floating upon an exclusive democratic 
plan. None denied the truth of that. The Con- 
federacy, which the Constitution superseded, had 
no executive head. Commonwealths end in anar- 
chy, or in one-man power. For these reasons the 
government most natural to the people of Amer- 
ica would be — as nearly as a republican form 
would allow, without losing or impairing its essen- 
tial distinctiveness — one that might most nearly 
assimilate to the British constitution " as its model." 
This proposition was thought best suited to the 
education, instincts, and real needs of the people ; 
and one requiring no radical or violent change, 
and allowing " a thorough reform of the existing 
system." Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jay, 
thought the same as to this being the requisite 
model. No commonwealth, no royalty, was cor- 
respondent to the conditions and demands of their 
country. It must be a Republic. " I am fully of 
opinion," wrote Washington, in answer to Madi- 
son, in February, 1787, " that those who lean to a 
monarchical government .... have not consulted 
the public mind." During the secret debates, 
Hamilton clearly and boldly took care, not only to 
be understood, but, that he should not be misun- 
derstood. " These truths," he said, when urging 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 1 3 

upon the convention the strength of a senate, to 
be composed of Hfe members, as a safeguard 
against the popular will, when impulsive and ir- 
regular in its proceedings, " are not often told in 
public assemblies, but they cannot be unknown to 
any who hear me." " As long as offices are open 
to all men, and no constitutional rank is estab- 
lished, it is pure republicanism. But if we incline 
too mtich to democracy^ we shall soon shoot into a 
monarchy!' " The fabric of the American Em- 
pire," are his emphatic words, " ought to rest on 
the solid basis of the consent of the People ; " and 
" the streams of national power ought to flow im- 
mediately from that pure original fountain of all 
legitimate authority." ^ And so, with similar en- 
lightened convictions, it was, that Mirabeau held 
not his peace when the throne of Louis was stag- 
gering to its destruction, and a new frame of gov- 
ernment was contemplated for the French people. 
" Even supposing, my friends," he said, in the un- 
guarded confidence of the moment, when Petion, 
and other unworthy intimates were present, on 
that occasion to which we have already referred, 
" that royalty were now to be abolished ; it is not 
a republic that must be established, — we are not 
yet ripe for this, — it must be a commonwealth." ^ 

^ Secret Debates of Convention, p. 170. 

2 The France of 1872 became "ripe" for a Republic, and its 
course indicates that the elements of perpetuity are inherent in its 
present prosperous republican form of government. 



14 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

He preferred to tolerate and curb royalty, than fly 
to the ills of a commonwealth. " From that mo- 
ment," says the Prince de Talleyrand, who was at 
the meeting, "such is my firm belief, his ruin was 
decided." Mirabeau was soon no more.^ Hamil- 
ton was confident that his own countrymen were 
," ripe " for the benefaction of a Republic. Sharp 
'.experience had, for ages, enured them to self-im- 
posed restraints upon the exercise of their politi- 
cal, moral, and, in the New England communi- 

1 The interview between Mirabeau and Talleyrand, on April 2d, 
1 791, is one of the most dramatic in personal memoirs. It was but 
two days before Mirabeau's death, commencing in the afternoon, 
near the fountain in the gardens of the Palais Royal, and ending 
late that night at the restaurateur Robert's. Talleyrand describes 
the whole scene, and says that Mirabeau depicted " the terrible fu- 
ture," and that never did " the herculean powers of his mind " ap- 
pear more impressive. At the dinner his late depression of mind 
left him ; he drank deeply ; his spirits rose high ; and he sang 
songs. Talleyrand says, in those recollections, " Already were 
Mirabeau's views and principles grown too tame, too reasonable, 
for these infuriated demagogues, and they had several times re- 
ceived with ill-temper his biting sarcasms at what he called their 
exaltation reptiblicaUie. I remember the effect produced upon one 
occasion at a private meeting of his friends, and the gloom and 
murmurs of rage with which the concluding words of a speech he 
had risen to make were received." The speech he alludes to is 
that of which we have, in the text, quoted the concluding words. 
" From that moment, such is my firm belief, his ruin was decided. 
The circumstances of his death will certainly justify, both to his 
friends and to posterity, every suspicion of poison ; while, on the 
other hand, there were no symptoms which could not be accounted 
for by the complaint under which it had from the first been pro- 
claimed that he was sinking." 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 15 

ties, even religious absolute rights. They had 
been educated in a severe school indeed, and the 
uses of adversity had been sweet to them. The 
United States of America became, and are, by 
natural induction, a Republic : constituted by the 
states in empire. 

The death of Casar consummated the Roman 
Empire. The daggers of the conspirators per- 
fected the thing which they meant to destroy. So, 
by a kindred but ignoble act, did the death of Ham- 
ilton bring over the dispositions of men a resur- 
rection of long-buried thought. For a time the 
turbulent passions sank to a repose, and the still 
small voice of reason could be heard ; and it was 
heeded. It was the death of Caesar which brought 
the Romans under the Empire. The death of 
Hamilton, in the fullness of time, confirmed the 
United States of America in their Empire; an 
empire which has grown, from the inherent energy 
of its republican union and democratic accretive 
development, into a Nation, united and strong: 
rich in national resources and of competent power. 
A power, new and untried ; and which, before 
those three-score years and ten had gone by, was 
to be put to the proof of its strength ; and, in that 
proof, was destined to disclose the invincibility of 
democracy when within the expression and com- 
mand of republican institutions. The fasces of 
Roman symbolism has, at last, found in statesman- 



1 6 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

ship the truth of which it is the emblem. For one 
hundred years the experiment of such government 
has gone on ; first, for a few years, by a confedera- 
tion of its sovereign States, and then, within a 
more perfect union, with decisive powers and a 
complete supremacy over all subjects delegated to 
it by the peoples of the several States, and over 
those auxiliary subjects which, by implication, may 
become necessary and convenient to the idea and 
power of a sovereign national authority. It was 
given to Hamilton to see political society in its 
first suggestive indications ; in its inchoate, crude 
process of formation. So he could, and did, ob- 
serve its growth into a matured organism ; and, as 
we might say, its anatomy became as familiar to 
him as were those principles which are essential 
to its viability. 

The man and the theme interest us. It was an 
experiment in governing thitherto unknown or 
untried. That political arrangement and check- 
mating among the Italian States, which arose from 
the brain of Lorenzo de' Medici,^ is more curious 
and nice than it proved to be efficacious ; and the 
Italian States soon again were hostile, and re- 
mained dissociate and apart. It failed ; but the 
Republic of the United States of America has en- 

^ See Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, vol. 2, p. 3. From 
that device, however, arose the modern idea of "the balance of 
power," which has exercised so important a part in European in- 
ternational affairs. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 1 7 

dured ; and has passed a century of years since its 
people declared themselves free and independent. 
They are united, strong, prosperous ; and have, 
this year of Our Lord, 1876, invited the people of 
all other lands to come in among them and wit- 
ness the evidences of their progress in arts and 
sciences. Her orators have instructed us of the 
past that we may be enabled to understand and 
value the present. Paeans have been sung to civil 
and religious liberty as illustrated and approved 
by the course of American constitutional govern- 
ment. The Landing of the Pilgrims, and the " Pil- 
grim's Progress," have again been rehearsed with an 
unimpaired freshness that age seems not to wither 
nor custom stale. But the name — no, not even 
the name — of Hamilton has come from either 
pen or lip on the day they celebrated. Is it, that, 
praising the tree of constitutional republican lib- 
erty and its fruit, and lost in that admiration, they 
forgot the root which, under the ground, still gives 
that tree life and vigor? We now rise to re- 
spond to the neglected name, and offer for accept- 
ance the sentiment : Alexander Hamilton, the 
founder of the Americmi States in Empire. 

On the 17th of September, 1787, the Conven- 
tion assembled at Philadelphia, at length agreed 
upon a federo-national Constitution, and closed its 
deliberations. That Constitution was now to be 
submitted to a Convention of delegates, chosen in 



1 8 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

each State by its people, under the recommenda- 
tion of its legislature, for their assent and rati- 
fication ; and each convention assenting to and 
ratifying the Convention was to give notice of the 
act to " the United States in Congress assembled." 
The delegates on behalf of the people of New 
York were requested to convene at Poughkeepsie, 
a town situate on the Hudson River, on the 17th 
of June following. The contest there for the 
adoption of the proposed new Constitution was to 
be earnest, sometimes fierce and acrimonious ; and 
between able and honest citizens who looked on 
the problem with widely differing interests and 
opinions. One party, led by George Clinton, then 
Governor of the State, regarded it as inevitably 
leading to the strangling of their new-born liberty, 
and surely to end in monarchy; the other party 
respected it as the only hope left, by which the dis- 
jected members of the existing Confederacy might 
be compelled to adhere together in a beneficial 
union ; and, thereby avoiding both monarchy and 
commonwealth, become entitled to the name, power, 
and credit of a nation. The moment was critical. 
The future of the colonies, now by fact of arms a 
nation in a league, hung trembling. The geo- 
graphical and political positions of New York, as 
related to the other States, were most important 
and precarious, and full of danger to itself. 

The man who had led, and who was to continue 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 19 

to guide, the Nationalists to successful, ultimate 
triumphs, was at this interval of time in the 
city of Albany. He had married, in 1 780, Eliza- 
beth, the second daughter of General Philip Schuy- 
ler, of that city, a distinguished soldier of the 
Revolution. Hamilton was now but thirty-one 
years old. His reputation for address, energy, and 
propriety of judgment, exceeded that of other men. 
His was, what Lamartine says of Mirabeau's wis- 
dom, " the infallibility of good sense." The epi- 
thet precocious never applied to him. From his 
youth up his intellectual work had none of the in- 
firmities of unripe effort. He was one of those 
few instances in which an intuitive knowledge 
seems to supersede the labor of learning, and the 
hidden nature of things appears to come without 
the effort of experiment. " He could see conse- 
quents yet dormant in their principles."^ This 
sounds like extravagant eulogy, but the full devel- 
opment of our theme will show that we are paint- 
ing an accurate portrait in natural colors. The 
founders of empire are the exception in history. 
Perhaps history does not teach a more interesting 
example of man's faith in a principle, and of hero- 
ism in its propagation. Columbus did not previse, 
in his mind's eye, more clearly, beyond the waste 
of waters, a new physical world, than did Hamilton 
perceive the new world of political household. 

^ South's Works, vol. i, p. 26. 



20 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

Simple, abiding faith, in what to them was an 
intellectual demonstration of unrevealed truth, im- 
pelled each to embark for untried, unknown, specu- 
lative worlds. The fecundity, power, vigor, and 
maturity of his intellectual labors had then as fully 
impressed his contemporaries as they have since 
impressed posterity. Knowledge, as acquired, 
was in him carried into faculty. He had in rare 
endowment the two faculties which are the pre- 
rogative of man : the powers of abstraction and of 
imagination. The " occasion sudden " never found 
him unprepared. It seemed intuition. This in- 
tuitional genius of his mind attracted the attention 
of the most acute and exact judge of men that 
modern times has produced. 

When Talleyrand, in stress of politics, arrived 
in America, in 1794, he became personally and in- 
timately acquainted with Hamilton. There were 
many things in common to the previous studies of 
these two extraordinary characters, and their polit- 
ical experiences were not without likeness. Dis- 
similar in their mental and moral natures, each 
revealed to the other unique resources for deep 
conference. Friendship followed admiration. The 
cool head and heart of Talleyrand were aglow 
with a fervid respect. They readily understood 
each other. They had each worked upon like sub- 
jects of public concern, and each had been em- 
ployed by his respective country in similar ques- 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 21 

tions of national finance and public credit. While 
yet the Abbe de Perigord, Talleyrand had acquired 
a serviceable knowledge of the science of finance, 
and of the fiscal condition of his nation. His 
studies were pursued chiefly during a brief season 
of retirement at Autun. Hamilton's were wrought 
out amid the stir of active war ; and his famous 
letter to Robert Morris was written by camp-fires, 
while the army was in winter quarters at Morris- 
town. They had each come to the belief, and ad- 
vocated that " in a national bank alone can be 
found the ingredients to constitute a wholesome, 
solid, and beneficial credit." Talleyrand, when 
Necker presented his elaborate report on the fiscal 
state of France, found an opportunity on that oc- 
casion to prove his knowledge of the subject, and 
his ability to develop and make it intelligible and 
interesting. In his speech, December 4, 1789, he 
had proposed a national bank, and the accumula- 
tion of a sinking fund for the gradual payment of 
the public debt. On January 28, 1790, he had re- 
ported a plan for the establishment of a mint. 
They had also, each, considered of, and, by the 
request of the national legislatures reported, a 
scheme concerning manufactures and commerce, 
and an adequate protective policy.-"- Talleyrand 

I Hamilton was the parent of protection to American industry. 
Henry Clay and, afterwards, Horace Greeley were the revivers of 
his policy, and its persistent advocates. 



2 2 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

had proposed a uniform system of weights and 
measures ; a system looking to uniformity among 
all nations ; and it was adopted by his exertions, 
— it has proved to be the one most worthy of 
universal use. They had each formed a plan of 
public education. Talleyrand had presented his 
report to the National Assembly. In it he treated 
of the origin of public education, its objects, its 
organization, and its methods. It is said that this 
was the first time public education, as a duty of 
the state, had been proposed in Europe. The 
plan, it is true, was not then undertaken. But 
when public affairs became settled after the Revo- 
lution of 1830, and when a citizen king was 
brought in, chiefly by Talleyrand's diplomacy, a 
kindred system of national instruction was estab- 
lished, in which the main features of his plan 
were engrafted upon the more mature and per- 
fect school system which had been devised by 
Hamilton. They had, also, each confirmed opin- 
ions concerning the general nature and science of 
popular government. Those opinions were alike, 
and came from like reflection. Their conception 
of a legislative assembly had been inspired by the 
English theory. The English constitution was no 
exotic in France. It had borne fruit there from 
an early day. A Philip de Comines had praised 
its polity in the fifteenth century, and a De Lolme 
had explained its growth, lauded its principles of 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 23 

civil liberty, and enforced its example three centu- 
ries later. A simple single assembly was not a 
fit depositary for power. So thought Hamilton, 
instructed by the lessons of the Congress of the 
Confederation ; and so thought Talleyrand, in- 
structed by those of the States-General at Ver- 
sailles. Their studies had been in the deep, clear, 
tranquil principles of the English Constitution, 
as instituted by Alfred the Great ; overborne for 
centuries by the Norman Conquest, and revived 
in dignity and power when England, in the Revo- 
lution of 1688, re-settled its liberties upon the an- 
cient foundations from which it had been violently 
pushed centuries before. The principle of the 
Revolution of 1688 was the instructive prototype 
which sanctioned the revolt of the American col- 
onists in 1776. Talleyrand had wished as well 
for France ; but 1 793, as a mighty flood, had burst 
its way through all restraints and dykes, and 
spread destruction and desolation far and wide. 
The people became a mob ; then, naturally and of 
course, absolute power became centered in few 
hands ; then the Reign of Terror. France had 
attempted to establish philosophy by crime, and 
liberty by license. Hamilton and Talleyrand had 
learned by experience that true government was 
law ; and in constitutional law alone was to be 
found perfect liberty. It is well worth the time to 
continue this comparison a while longer, that we 



24 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

may so observe how similarly men act when 
nursed in the same alma mater of statehousehold. 
Like principles, when followed, produce like re- 
sults. Hamilton rejected in his theory of govern- 
ment for America all forms which were not the 
embodiments of a true republican system. Hence 
he regarded the English Constitution as the " best 
model to work from." Talleyrand's preference 
was for a limited and constitutional monarchy. 
Lafayette and the constitutional party had the 
same preference ; and they and Talleyrand were 
the sincere reproducers of the doctrines of Mira- 
beau. A government for the people, rather than a 
government by the people. This habit of thought 
Hamilton and Talleyrand had already acted upon 
when they each represented their constituencies 
in a public representative capacity. They had 
each acted upon "implied powers." As in the 
Convention of 1781, at Philadelphia, so at Ver- 
sailles, in 1789, the delegates were called upon 
to decide whether they would obey the literal in- 
structions received. A majority in each of these 
popular assemblies decided that it was their duty, 
as representatives, to consult the interests, in pref- 
erence to the opinions, of their constituents. Ed- 
mund Burke had more than once, in 1774-80, 
taken the same exalted ground before the electors 
of Bristol.^ Indeed, when the States-General were 

1 " Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 25 

summoned to meet together at Versailles, notning 
was contemplated beyond a consultation on the 
state of France. A constitution was not dreamed 
of, and its solemn acceptance by the king was a 
vision that had not arisen before the wildest fancy. 
Talleyrand was among the foremost in the mak- 
ing of that constitution. Jefiferson was then the 
American Plenipotentiary to France, and a fre- 
quent spectator of the proceedings at Versailles. 
America had set an example concerning the duty 
of representatives, which, perhaps, was not without 
its influence. When the delegates were appointed 
to Philadelphia " there was no expectation on the 
part of any State that any other principle would 
be adopted as the basis of action than that by 
which the Articles of Confederation contemplated 
that all changes should be effected by the action 
of the States assembled by the unanimous assent 
of the different state legislatures." But the Amer- 
ican deleQ:ates o:ave to their instructions a broader 
purpose by interpretation, and claimed, by infer- 
ence, a corresponding authority. They esteemed 
it safer to be faithful to the object of the trust, 
and not mechanical reflectors of impulsive senti- 
ment ; to have the determination of public ques- 
tions follow, not precede, debate. This was the 

judgment ; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices 
it to your opinion." — Burke's Works, vol. 3, p. 232 ; his Speech 
on the Conclusion of the Poll (1774). 



26 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

way they spoke and acted at Philadelphia, and 
at Versailles. Hamilton and Talleyrand had thus, 
each independently of the other, concurred in the 
fundamental axiom of the essentiality of " implied 
powers." It is the key-note to the progress and 
history of the American Republic. In the due oc- 
currence, or chance, which brought these two men 
into the active, responsible administrations of the 
governments of their countries, there is a striking 
coincidence. The picture does not lack comple- 
tion even in its mere accessories of circumstance. 
Colonne, Minister of Finance, desired Mirabeau to 
draft a paper on the finances of the country. Mir- 
abeau declined ; but he directed the attention of 
the minister to Talleyrand : " You have stated to 
me the regret you experienced at my unwilling- 
ness to devote my feeble talents to the embodying 
of your conceptions. Permit me, sir, to point out 
to you a man more deserving, in every respect, of 
this proof of confidence. The Abbe de Perigord 
unites great and tried abilities to profound cir- 
cumspection and unshaken discretion. You will 
never find a man .... who possesses more the 
capacity to conceive great designs, and the cour- 
age to execute them." Washington, forming his 
first cabinet, applied to Robert Morris, the famous 
financier of the revolutionary and confederate 
epochs, to undertake the duties of the Secretary- 
ship of the Treasury; he declined, but named 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 27 

Hamilton " as the one man in the United States " 
fitted by studies and abihty to create a pubhc 
credit, and to bring the resources of the country 
into active efficiency. Washington found, in his 
former miHtary secretary, the one thing most 
needed ; the fiscal affairs of the nation at once 
were organized, and prosperity quickly came. 
Hamilton achieved therein an immediate suc- 
cess which, all agree, is without parallel. 

Talleyrand felt in France that a destructive tem- 
pest was coming, and, admonished, he procured an 
appointment on a mission to England to elude its 
direct effects ; he was, nevertheless, proscribed by 
his own country ; he was ordered, by direction of 
Pitt, under the alien law, to depart from Great 
Britain within three days. He had known Pitt, in 
his youth, when he was, during a short stay, the 
guest at Paris of the Bishop of Rheims, an uncle 
of Talleyrand's; but he thought it indelicate to 
remind the supercilious minister of the former ac- 
quaintance.-^ Nowhere in Europe could the pro- 

1 During the first interview between Pitt and Talleyrand, when 
the latter was on his first mission to England, in 1791, he thought 
it was Pitt's place to recollect their former acquaintance, — for 
which reason Talleyrand did not mention it. Pitt, who did not 
wish for any renewal of intimacy, did not even allude to the circum- 
stance, nor speak to him about his uncle. Talleyrand did not for- 
get the incivility in after life, and when Austerlitz was fought and 
won he came nearly consummating a European league, of which 
England was to be the hostile objective point. That plan pro- 
posed to Napoleon at Ulm was found, in Talleyrand's own hand- 



28 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

scribed and excommunicated Perigord find a safe 
refuge ; so, in 1 794, he departed for America. 
There he remained until the decree of proscrip- 
tion was, in September, 1795, revoked. Talleyrand 
and Hamilton soon met, of course. Their friend- 
ship is not a mere episode, but constitutes a prom- 
inent chapter, in their memoirs. Hamilton was 
then Secretaiy of the Treasury in Washington's 
administration. He had done the great work of 
his public life ; redeemed the financial honor of his 
country ; established its public credit ; and set in 
motion the springs of its abundant and many 
sources of prosperity. He was in the thirty-sev- 
enth year of his age — Talleyrand was but three 
years his senior. Hamilton spoke the French lan- 
guage fluently, with correctness, and fine expres- 
sion. Each was master of a language common to 
both. Hamilton's ruddy, vivacious countenance, 
inviting confidence, was in notable contrast to the 
other's pale repose ; but the fascination of Talley- 
rand's bland and polished manner was irresistible 
for Hamilton. Talleyrand's experience of remark- 
able men was great and varied.. He had met Vol- 
taire when the philosopher of Ferney came for 

■writing, among his secret papers, after his death. Napoleon had 
other ambitious views, and neglected the project. The Talleyrand 
of 1830-38 had a changed policy, and desired a close friendship 
between England and France. The reciprocal visits of the sov- 
ereigns at Windsor and St. Cloud were among the results of that 
policy. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 29 

the last time to Paris. The young Abbe was 
enchanted with the keen inteUigence and subtle 
speech of that supreme scoffer of the eighteenth 
century. He was received in a darkened cham- 
ber, and through an opening in the curtains it was 
so arranged that a single stream of subdued light 
fell upon the seated, draped figure of Voltaire. 
The light fell on him alone. It was the Rem- 
brandt effect. The genius of philosophy in chiaro- 
oscuro} Talleyrand's susceptible vein of satire was 

^ Voltaire was much given to the coup de theatre. The familiar 
scene in the Academy of Science (April 29, 1798), is graphically 
described by John Adams, who was there among the spectators. 
" Voltaire and Franklin were both present, and there arose a gen- 
eral cry that M. Voltaire and M. Franklin should be introduced to 
each other. This was done, and they bowed and spoke to each 

other But this was not enough. The clamor continued 

until the exclamation came out, ' II faut s'embrasser h, la Frangaise.' 
The two aged actors upon the great theatre of philosophy and fri- 
volity then embraced each other, by hugging one another in their 
arms and kissing each other's cheeks, and then the tumult sub- 
sided. And the cry immediately spread throughout the kingdom, 
and I suppose throughout Europe, ' Qu'il dtait charmant de voir 
embrasser Solon et Sophocle ! '" " When the American philoso- 
pher," says Condorcet, " presented his grandson for his benedic- 
tion, 'God and Liberty,' uttered Voltaire, 'the only benediction 
suitable for a grandson of Franklin.' " — Franklttt's Life (Bige- 
low's edition), vol. 2, p. 431. 

When the writer of this essay was at Ferney, Switzerland, in 
the summer of 1870, he noticed on the wall of the chamber in 
which Voltaire died an engraved likeness of Franklin. All things 
in that chamber remain as at the time of Voltaire's death, and that 
engraving retains its place among the portraits of the distinguished 
men whom he liked to honor even in his household. 



30 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

touched ; but he wondered at the colloquial power 
of Voltaire. That wonder was not elevated nor 
tempered by respect. He early became captivated 
by the companionable qualities, discriminating' 
taste, and superb intellect of Hamilton. Hamilton, 
in truth, was a revelation to Talleyrand of a higher 
degree of human nature, and brought to his recol- 
lection afresh the impressions of Mirabeau and of 
Charles James Fox. He found in Hamilton one 
who was, also, as preeminently as himself in his 
own famous social sphere, the first of conversa- 
tionists. While the sparkling utots of Talleyrand 
flew from lips to ear with the applause of delight- 
ful excitement, it was always the strong sense of 
Hamilton's that lodged his animated thought into 
the very mind, and there induced reflection. Each 
was distinctively a gem — yet alike. As the sin- 
gle drop of pure dew resembles its crystallized 
similitude, the diamond, so did the clear intellect 
of Hamilton resemble that of Talleyrand. The 
one, full of life and lustrous — the other, fixed and 
brilliant. Talleyrand, notwidistanding this dry 
intellectual quality, was probably capable of deep 
moral feeling and as sensitive as Hamilton. If 
Talleyrand were, indeed, the ideal of attractive in- 
sincerities and elegant deceptiveness, which gossips 
of the salons have represented him to be, he could 
have felt little pleasure in the frank, ingenuous 
nature of Hamilton ; nor could the latter have so 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 3 1 

given himself to a devious-minded, artful, plausible 
diplomatist prone and skilled to circumvent and 
deceive. It will yet surely be entirely disclosed, 
when the seal of the secret memoirs of the Prince 
is broken and they are unfolded, — as they are 
promised to be within the next fifteen years, — that 
the judgment pronounced in the House of Lords 
by the Duke of Wellington will be verified and 
approved.^ His real character and his agency in 
the great affairs of his time will not be fairly 
known until they are seen as drawn by his own 
hand. 

The personal individuality of Talleyrand is a fa- 
miliar historical portrait. His features were hand- 
some and refined ; soft dark eyes, much veiled by 
the lids, contributed to an air of quiet reverie, 

^ In answer to remarks which fell from Lord Londonderry, Oc- 
tober, 183 1, concerning Prince Talleyrand, the Duke of Welling- 
ton said that none of the great measures resolved upon at Vienna 
and Paris had been concerted or carried on without the interven- 
tion of that eminent person. " In all the transactions in which I 
have been engaged with Prince Talleyrand, no man could have 
conducted himself with more firmness and ability in regard to his 
own country, or with more uprightness and honor in all his com- 
munications with the ministers of other countries, than Prince Tal- 
leyrand. No man's public and private character has ever been so 
much belied as those of that illustrious individual." Lord Holland 
added that no man's private character had been more shamefully 
traduced, and no man's public conduct more mistaken and misrep- 
resented, than that of Talleyrand. His behavior towards the 
American Commissioners at Paris, in 1797-98, will be likely to 
receive consideration in a subsequent part of this essay. 



32 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

which, being habitual to him, was popularly mis- 
construed for an indication of natural secretive- 
ness and politic scheming; and this habit blended 
and was in harmony with the pensiveness and aris- 
tocratic delicacy of his complexion. The defect 
of lameness was not readily observable in his 
handsome figure and graceful demeanor. Would 
not the pen of a Walter Savage Landor have had 
a felicitous labor in depicting the probable confer- 
ences of these two characters in an " Imaginary 
Conversation ; " one that would have won our ad- 
miration as that fabled between Talleyrand and 
Louis XVIII. moves us to contempt and mirth. 
The respect and friendship of Talleyrand for Ham- 
ilton always continued ; and, when the former was 
permitted to return to his native land, he called 
upon Hamilton to say adieu. Seeing on the man- 
tel-piece a miniature of the American Secretary, 
he took it in hand and requested it for a souvenir. 
Hamilton was not free to give it ; so Talleyrand 
borrowed it, and had a verisimilitude painted in 
France, which yet keeps its place on the walls of 
the home of the Talleyrands. It is that portrait 
which has been engraved, and is known as the 
Talleyrand miniature. It represents Hamilton in 
the civic costume of the time, with hair pow- 
dered, ending in a cue ; and it bears a likeness to 
the celebrated bust by Cerrachi. There is an 
anecdote connected with this miniature which Tal- 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 33 

leyrand related to Mr. Van Buren during the last 
evening they spent together in London. " Burr," 
said the Prince, " called in pursuance of a pre- 
vious communication from him, and his card being 
brought up, he directed the messenger to say that 
he could not receive a visit from Colonel Burr, 
and referred him, for an explanation of his refusal, 
to a painting hanging over the mantel-piece in 
the ante-chamber, which was a portrait of Hamil- 
ton." Talleyrand frequently spoke his high opin- 
ion of Hamilton's genius. He had, before he went 
to America, learned much of him ; his renown had 
reached Versailles. A translation of " The Fed- 
eralist " appeared in Paris in 1792. Talleyrand, 
therefore, expected to find in him one who was 
deeply versed in all questions relating to general 
government, and its bearing on American repub- 
licanism ; but he did not expect to find in him a 
comprehensive and penetrating intellect which had 
pierced through and through the very substance of 
the politics of Europe ; and grasping the entire 
controversy that was about to make Europe one 
immense battle-field, upon which its giant frame 
should sink down exhausted by the paroxysm. 
He laid bare the subject with marvelous power 
of simplification. "One day in January, 1819, 
talking with Prince Talleyrand, in Paris, about 
his visit to America, he expressed the highest 
admiration of Mr. Hamilton, saying, among other 
3 



34 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

things, that he had known nearly all the marked 
men of his time, but that he had never known 
one, on the whole, equal to him. I was most 
surprised and gratified," writes in 1854 the cele- 
brated George Ticknor, " with the remark ; but 
still, feeling that, as an American, I was in some 
sort a party concerned by patriotism in the com- 
pliment, I answered with a little reserve, that the 
great military commanders and the great states- 
men of Europe had dealt with larger masses and 
wider interests than he had. ' Mais, Monsieur,' 
the Prince instantly replied, ' Hamilton avait de- 
vine I'Europe.' " ^ Talleyrand repeated the same 
opinion to others ; and on some of those occasions 
mentioned the most exalted characters he had 
personally known as less in intellectual greatness 
than Hamilton.^ " When I was Minister of the 

^ Curtis's History of the Constitution of the United States, vol. 
2, p. 410, note. The word "divine" was a favorite one with Tal- 
leyrand. When on his death-bed books of devotion were brought 
to him, at his own request, one especially, The Chrisiiatt Religion 
Studied itt the True Spirit of its Maxijns. " The recollections 
which you recall," said he to his spiritual adviser and friend, the 
Ahh6 Dupauloup, " are dear to me, and I thank you for having 
divined the place they have preserved in my thoughts and in my 
heart." 

2 " Le prince, qui fut son ami et qui vdcut avec lui durant son 
sejour en Amerique, r^pondit k quelqu'un qui lui demandait quels 
^taient les hommes les plus remarquables qu'il avait rencontrds 
dans sa longue carriere : 'Je considere Napoleon, Fox, et Hamil- 
ton comme les trois plus grands hommes de notre dpoque, et si je 
devais me prononcer entre les trois, je donnerais sans hdsiter la 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 35 

United States in England," writes President Van 
Buren, " I saw much of Prince Talleyrand, the 
French Ambassador at the same court, and en- 
joyed relations of marked kindness with him. In 
my formal visits to him we had long and frequent 
conversations, in which Hamilton, his acquaint- 
ance with him in this country, and incidents in 
their intercourse, were his favorite themes. He 
always spoke with great admiration of his talents, 
and during the last evening that I spent with him 
he said that he regarded Hamilton as the ablest 
man he became acquainted with in America, — he 
was not sure that he might not add without in- 
justice, or that he had known in Europe." 

What we wish to have noted is, that this master 
judge of men had accurately observed and cor- 
rectly valued that most peculiar quality of Hamil- 
ton's mind, which qualified him to "see consequents 
yet dormant in their principles." ^ To exhibit the 

premiere place k Hamilton. II avait devine I'Europe.'" — Elude 
siir la Republlqite, par le Marquis de Talleyrand- Perigord, p. 192. 
^ Since writing the above the author has come upon the following 
passage in Mr. Curtis's Hislory of the Constitution, vol. i, p. 410 : 
Hamilton's " great characteristic was his profound insight into the 
principles of government. The sagacity with which he compre- 
hended all systems, and the thorough knowledge he possessed of 
the working of all the freer institutions of ancient and modern 
times, united with a singular capacity to make the experience of 
the past bear on the actual state of society, rendered him one of 
the most useful statesmen that America has known. Whatever in 
the science of government had already been ascertained ; what- 
ever the civil condition of mankind in any age had made practi- 



36 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

means which Talleyrand had for forming his opin- 
ion has been the chief reason why we have in- 
dulged ourselves in making this parallel of indi- 
vidual history, and of their mental and moral 
characteristics.^ 

Guizot, also, had read and reflected much upon 
the writings and political acts of Hamilton; and 
he says that Hamilton "must be classed among 
the men who have best known the vital principles 
and fundamental conditions of a government ; not 
of a government such as this [alluding to the 
government of France at that moment], but of 
a government worthy of its mission and of its 
name." 

His writing was of the school of Bolingbroke, 
and reminds us of that which Edmund Burke 
was still capable of at the time when he wrote 
" Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discon- 
tents." The letters in " The Federalist " are the 
best examples of his style of written expres- 

cable, or proved abortive ; whatever experience had demonstrated, 
whatever the passions, the interests, or the wants of men had made 
inevitable, — he seemed to know intuitively. But he was no theo- 
rist. His powers were all eminently practical." Mr. Curtis's His- 
tory is a very lucid recital of the course of events which lead to 
the project and to the adoption of the federal Constitution, and is 
enriched with graphic sketches of the several persons who assisted 
in the great undertaking. 

1 Talleyrand was born at Paris in 1754, and died at the hotel, 
which still bears his name, in that city, Thursday, May 17, 1838. 
He outlived Hamilton thirty-four years. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 37 

sion ; they are, also, the most highly esteemed and 
widely read. " ' The Federalist,' written princi- 
pally by Hamilton," says the " Edinburgh Review," 
No. 24, " exhibits an extent and precision of infor- 
mation, a profundity of research, and an accurate- 
ness of understanding which would have done 
honor to the most illustrious statesmen of ancient 
or modern times ; " and " Blackwood's Magazine," 
January, 1825, observes : " It is a work altogether, 
which, for comprehensiveness of design, strength, 
clearness, and simplicity has no parallel. We do 
not even except or overlook those of Montesquieu 
and Aristotle among the writings of men." Guizot 
said : " In the application of elementary principles 
of government to practical administration it was 
the greatest work known to him." Three trans- 
lations of " The Federalist " have been published 
in France; but no edition, as yet, so far as we 
are informed, has been printed in Great Britain. 
" Vous avez lu ' Le Federaliste ' } " said Talleyrand 
to the Due d'Aranda, then the Envoy from Spain 
at the French court. " Non," replied the ambas- 
sador. " Lisez donc-lisez," added Talleyrand, with 
emphasis.^ But much as has been, and may be, 

1 The latest edition of The Federalist is that one edited by Mr, 
John C. Hamihon, a son of the statesman, and pubUshed by Lip- 
pincott & Co., of Philadelphia, in 1875. The Historical Notice, 
which is written by Mr. Hamilton, and prefaces the book, is careful, 
candid, and full, and supplies all that seems to be desirable to elu- 
cidate its history and aid in its study. 



38 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

repeated concerning " The Federalist," it is the 
official advice, given by Hamilton, when Secretary 
of the Treasury, to President Washington, on the 
legality of a National Bank of the United States, 
in which he develops fully his doctrine concern- 
ing the " implied powers " of that government, 
which will remain forever as the maturest monu- 
ment of his philosophy in the broadest domain of 
American political jurisprudence. Chief Justice 
Marshall is the judicial expositor ^ of the meaning 

1 "Trois noms se ddtachent en relief dans I'histoire, et sont ce 
que j'appellerai la clef de voute sur laquelle se construira le grand 
ddifice de I'Union am^ricaine. Ces noms sont ceux de Washing- 
ton, Hamilton, Marshall. lis ne sont pas choisis arbitrairement ni 
k la Idgere ; ce sont leurs actes, les faits eux-memes qui les portent 
en avant, qui les ddtachent en lumiere sur les autres, et font qu'ils 
attirent du premier coup de I'oeil I'attention de celui qui etudie 
I'histoire des colonies americaines." — Etude sur la Rcptiblique 
des ttats-Unis d^Amirique, par le Marquis de Talleyrand-Perigord, 
p. i88. 

"John Marshall, chief-justice des Etats-Unis, fut I'homme qui 
entreprit ce long et difficile travail ; il sut I'accomplir avec una 
sup^riorite telle qu'on peut sans hdsiter le comparer, pour I'erudi- 
tion et I'interpretation claire et precise des lois, au chancelier 
d'Aguesseau." — p. 190. 

In the foregoing extracts the younger representative of the 
house of Talleyrand, with its traditional intelligence and acute- 
ness, shows that he has discerned the true relation of Marshall 
to be that of the acknowledged expositor of the Constitution. The 
following extract from the same book, shows that he has formed a 
right conception of Hamilton : — 

" Ce fut au g^nie constructeur politique d'Alexander Hamilton 
que I'Amerique doit sa constitution ; ce fut lui qui fournit les ma- 
teriaux essentiels, qui la composent. C'est k lui qu'elle doit le plan 
gdndral de I'ddifice ; c'est lui qui dessina les lignes qui font de cette 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 39 

of the Constitution, and he ever esteemed the 
writings of Hamilton as the reasonable and safest 
guide in its interpretation. The judgments of the 
Supreme Court, especially when Marshall presided 
there, upon questions arising under the Constitu- 
tion, are commentaries upon the knowledge and 
wisdom of which those writings are the depos- 
itary. 

The elaborate report "nominally upon manu- 
factures, but embracing in its range every pursuit 
of human industry susceptible of encouragement 
under an unlimited government," was thought by 
President Van Buren to be " Hamilton's master- 
piece ; " and, he says, that by it " the subject was 
first brought to the notice, and recommended to 
the consideration of Congress." 

It is not within the scope of this study to treat 
of Hamilton as a jurist in the labors peculiar to 
the profession. Yet that side of his triple talents 
cannot be wholly passed by unnoticed. It will 
be remarked that his labors therein were akin to 

constitution un des monuments les plus remarquables de I'histoire. 
Grace k son dnergie, k son patriotisme, a sa merveilleuse intelli- 
gence et k son Eloquence, il parvint k diriger I'esprit public vers la 
n^cessitd d'une union plus coh^rente, plus parfaite. Sachant faire 
taire les sentiments dgoistes dds diffdrents Etats, ils les amena i. 
concourir k I'achevement du grand ceuvre. La constitution achevde, 
une chose restait a accomplir : il fallait donner une interpretation 
iudiciaire, claire, precise, et lucide de cette constitution dans les 
rapports constants qu'elle serait appellde k avoir avec les dvdne- 
ments publics." — p. 190. 



40 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

those of his political life, — the creative and or- 
ganizing faculty was ever industrious and produc- 
tive. Chancellor Kent, in an address vdiich he 
delivered October 21, 1836, before the Law Asso- 
ciation of the city of New York, gives a sketch of 
this phase of the public life of Hamilton, whose 
marvelous power for continued labor and vigorous 
aptitude for deep research impressed the Chancel- 
lor from their first acquaintance. It was the cus- 
tom of Hamilton, he says, to " ransack cases and 
precedents to their very foundations ; " and that he 
did not content himself with anything less than 
going to the original sources ; that he was familiar 
with the great Civilians, and thoroughly imbued 
with the ample and comprehensive spirit which 
distinguishes their writings ; and that he, pursuing 
with elaborate care, attained rich results by, " in- 
quiries into the commercial codes of the nations of 
the European continent." ^ It is certain that, on 

1 The writer has been informed, but by whom he finds himself 
now unable to recollect, that Chancellor Kent was influenced by 
the urgent advice of Hamilton to give the special attention, which 
he did, to the works of the Civilians. The writer, when a boy, had 
the honor to be known to the Chancellor, and read to him in his 
room at William S. Johnson's law-offices, in New York, the copy, 
while the Chancellor corrected the proof-sheets for the third vol- 
ume of the third edition of the Commentaries. This was in 1841. 
The Chancellor was one of the most lively, charming, companion- 
able of men, and very loquacious. It may be probable that the 
writer was told at that time by the Chancellor how it was he gave 
such special devotion to the study of the civil law, although it 
would have been for any one, besides that amiable, eminent man, 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 4 1 

the retirement of Chief Justice Jay, the office of 
the Chief Justice of the United States was offered 
to Hamilton, so high did he stand in the estima- 
tion of all as a lawyer. He declined the nomina- 
tion. His ambition and duty lay elsewhere in the 
public service. There are traditions which pre- 
serve an idea of his manner as a forensic advocate. 
They remind us somewhat of the manner which 
Brougham describes as characteristic of Erskine. 
Animated reasoning, glowing, chaste diction, and 
forcible earnestness were the elements which 
marked their efforts at the bar. None of Hamil- 
ton's forensic speeches were reported in full. Even 
the speech in which he submitted, in the case of 
The People v. Croswell, the definition of a libel, 
punishable as a public offense, is only a skeleton 
of the chief points and of the general course of 
reasoning. That definition has been incorporated 
into the jurisprudence of the several States and of 
foreign countries, and in some of the States has 
been embodied in the constitutions. 

We have something to say of his manner of 
popular speaking. It was deliberate, sustained, and 
impassioned. Those who heard both have spoken 
of his manner as like that of the younger Pitt. 
But Pitt was cold, lofty, and declamatory. Ham- 

an unusual topic to speak of to a mere lad. See Appendix for 
some extracts from the Address delivered by the Chancellor relat- 
ing to Hamilton. 



42 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

ilton was warm and genial, and considered the log- 
ical more than the mere rhetorical. Both, however, 
had the same weighty and authoritative air. But 
Pitt was not a great lawyer, nor, if Lord Macau- 
lay's judgment is to be regarded as sound,^ was 
he a great statesman. Tried by the standard of 
that age, he was a great man. That standard 
was in parliamentary government, which is de- 
scribed as " government by speaking." Pitt was 
surely a great " master of the whole art of parlia- 
mentary government." He domineered over the 
minds of his auditors. Legislation and adminis- 
tration were with him secondary matters. His in- 
feriority becomes obvious when he is compared 
with a Tully, a Somers, an Oxenstiern, a John 
De Witt, and, let us add unhesitatingly, a Hamil- 

1 " Very idle apprehensions were generally entertained, that the 
public debt, though much less than a third of the debt which we 
now bear with ease, would be found too heavy for the strength of 
the nation. Those apprehensions might not perhaps have been 
easily quieted by reason. But Pitt quieted them by a juggle. He 
succeeding in persuading first himself, and then the whole nation, 
his opponents included, that a new sinking fund, which, so far as it 
diflFered from former sinking funds, differed for the worse, would 
by virtue of some mysterious power of propagation belonging to 
money, put into the pocket of the public creditor great sums, not 
taken out of the pocket of the tax-payer. The country, terrified by 
a danger which was no danger, hailed with delight and boundless 
confidence a remedy which was no remedy. The minister was al- 
most universally extolled as the greatest of financiers." — Article, 
"William Pitt," written by Macaulay, Encyclopedia Britannica^ 
January, 1859. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 43 

ton. These men were great as projectors of gov- 
ernment. Great in the closet, great at the council 
board, and some of them great in the arena of de- 
bate. Hamilton was a marvel of success in creat- 
ing a credit, and relieving his country from the 
burden of debt. Pitt was a failure in his financial 
system, and increased the public debt of England 
to such an incomprehensible magnitude, that his 
admirers are fond of mitigating the burden by de- 
scribing it as a public blessing. The habit of com- 
paring these two men, in all other mental respects 
dissimilar, has come from the attractive circum- 
stances of each having at so early an age been 
brought into the public service of their countries ; 
each being, in a maturity of youth, the conspic- 
uous member of the administration of govern- 
ment ; and having a manner of oratory belonging 
to the same school. Hamilton was as great as 
Pitt in the control of the will of deliberative as- 
semblies. Hamilton, in common with Pitt, had 
that moral virtue inestimable for the talented and 
successful public man : he was known to be free 
from avarice and kindred dishonesty. Poor in 
the midst of abundance, and surrounded with the 
temptation of opportunity to get money, he neg- 
lected his own individual advantages, and dedi- 
cated himself to his country. This virtue his 
most adverse political foes admitted and admired. 
" Mr. Jefferson's habitual tone in speaking of Col- 



44 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

onel Hamilton," wrote the Hon. Nicholas P. Twist, 
May 31, 1857, to President Van Buren, "was al- 
ways the very reverse of that in which he spoke 
of those whose characters, personal or political, 
were objects of his disesteem. It was invariably 
such as to indicate, and to infuse a high estimate 
of Colonel Hamilton, as a man, whether consid- 
ered with reference to personal matters or to 
political matters. As regards politics, their con- 
victions, their creeds, were diametrically opposite." 
And President Van Buren, for himself, speaks of 
" Hamilton's elevated character in private life : 
upon whose integrity and fidelity in his personal 
dealings, and in the discharge of every private 
trust that was reposed in him, no shadow rested, 
who was indifferent to the accumulation of wealth, 
who as a public man was so free from intrigues 
for personal advancement, and whose thoughts 
and acts in that character were so constantly di- 
rected to great questions and great interests." 
His health was impaired and nearly broke under 
the loads imposed by his public and private duties. 
Talleyrand was walking, late one night, past the 
small brick house in Garden Street, in the city of 
New York, where Hamilton kept his law cham- 
bers. He was, as usual, at work. The next day 
the Prince, calling upon a lady, said to her : " I 
have seen one of the wonders of the world. I 
have seen a man laboring all night for the support 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 45 

of his family, who has made the fortune of a na- 
tion." 

The name and personal appearance of Hamil- 
ton were, at the epoch of the formation of the 
American Constitution, familiar to the American 
people. He was, as has been described to the 
writer by some that knew and one that loved him,^ 
a small, lithe figure, instinct with life ; erect, and 
steady in gait ; a military presence, without the in- 
tolerable accuracy of a martinet ; and his general 
address was graceful and nervous, indicating the 
beauty, energy, and activity of his mind. A bright, 
ruddy complexion ; light-colored hair; a mouth in- 
finite in expression, its sweet smile being most ob- 
servable and most spoken of; eyes lustrous with 
deep meaning and reflection, or glancing with 
quick canny pleasantry, and the whole counte- 
nance decidedly Scottish in form and expression. ( 
He was, as may be inferred, the welcome guest 
and cheery companion in all relations of civil and 
social life. His political enemies frankly spoke 
of his manner and conversation, and regretted its 
irresistible charm. He certainly had a correct 
sense of that which is appropriate to the occasion 
and its object : the attribute which we call good 
taste. His manner, with a natural change, be- 

^ Catherine V. R. Cochrane, the sister-in-law of Hamilton, and 
youngest daughter of General Schuyler. She spent the latter 
years of her life at Oswego, N. Y. 



46 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

came very calm and grave when " deliberation and 
public care " claimed his whole attention. At the 
time of which we now speak particularly (1787), 
he was continually brooding over the State con- 
vention then at hand ; moods of engrossing 
thought came upon him even as he trod the 
crowded streets, and then his pace would become 
slower, his head be slightly bent downward, and, 
with hands joined together behind, he wended his 
way, his lips moving in concert with the thoughts 
forming in his mind. This habit of thinking, and 
this attitude, became involuntary with him as he 
grew in years. 

Such was the individuality, personal, intellec- 
tual, and moral, of the man. He who was the ar- 
chitect and organizer of the new frame of govern- 
ment. It has been imputed that he managed the 
affair in water too deep for others. True. Not, 
however, in a deceitful or objectionable, but in a 
wise and masterly, sense. He knew well that in 
deep waters shallows and dangerous rocks are best 
avoided. It is only in our own times that a war 
for that Union has enabled us to really fathom the 
depth of his intentions and comprehensive policy. 
That intention and policy will receive our consid- 
eration when we come to treat of him as the 
Founder of Empire, and as the Organizer of its 
Administration of Government. 

Alexander Hamilton was born a British sub- 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 47 

ject, at Nevis, one of the West Indian Islands, on 
the nth of January, 1757. His father was a son 
of Alexander Hamilton, of Grange, who in 1730 
married Elizabeth, a daughter of Sir Robert Pol- 
lock. His mother was the child of a Huguenot, 
who had been driven from his country by the edict 
of Nantes. France and Scotland have not been 
unkindred alliances. Their intimacies have been 
many and dear. A Scotch guard adorned the 
court of a Louis XI. ; a Mary, " Queen of Scots 
and of Hearts," shared for a too brief reign the 
throne of France ; and France gave a refuge to 
the exiled Stuart. Michelet observes the relation 
of the people of these kingdoms. The fallen state 
of his father's business affairs allowed relatives of 
his mother to undertake the care and education of 
the lad, and he went with them to Santa Cruz ; 
here he soon became proficient in the French and 
English languages. Before he had reached his 
thirteenth year he was taken from school, entered 
a mercantile house, and in a year's time was 
deemed capable to have control of the business 
during his principal's temporary absence from the 
island. A letter written by him at this early age 
discloses the lad's disposition and spirit. It was 
to a young friend named Stevens, afterwards his 
life-long friend. It is dated November 11, 1769. 
" To confess, Ned, my ambition is prevalent, so 
that I contemn the groveling ambition of a clerk, 



48 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

or the like, to which my fortune condemns me, 
and would willingly risk my life, though not my 
character, to exalt my station. I . . . . mean to 
prepare the way for futurity. I 'm no philosopher, 
you see, and may be justly said to build castles in 
the air; my folly makes me ashamed, and beg 
you '11 conceal it. Yet, Neddy, we have seen such 
schemes successful, when the projector is con- 
stant." An avenue opened. In August, 1772, a 
most violent storm burst upon those islands ; a 
description of its fearful effects was published in 
a local newspaper; the author was sought, and 
discovered by the Governor of the Island of St. 
Croix to be the boy Hamilton. Arrangements 
were made, offered to him and accepted, by which 
his liberal education was provided for. In Octo- 
ber, 1772, he departed on the journey to New 
York by the way of Boston ; without delay he 
entered the Grammar School at Elizabethtown, 
near New York. A few months were found suffi- 
cient to prepare him for college, and, before the 
winter of 1773 had passed, he was a student at 
King's College in the city of New York. The 
rapidity and thoroughness of his learning relieved 
him, by special privilege, from the time required 
by the rules for the usual curriculum. His appli- 
cation was very close and severe during this pre- 
paratory course, and afterwards in the college. 
A storm was already gathering in the political 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 49 

heavens more portentous than that which had 
swept over the West Indies, and its effect upon 
his destiny was to be as controUing and more de- 
terminate. But the student, if he noticed, was not 
distracted by the outward world. The academic 
grove claimed his duty, and had that claim allowed. 
There was a quiet, retiring spot, then called Bat- 
teau Street, where stately trees formed shady 
groves ; here he took his daily walks, reflecting on 
his daily lessons ; adding to his knowledge by 
conning over " thoughts of other men," and get- 
ting wisdom by being "attentive to his own." 
The genius of ambition did not intrude upon him 
there. Yet the time had come when he was to be 
summoned forth to " the battles, sieges, fortunes " 
of an eventful life. 

A visit to Boston in the spring of 1774 brought 
him where the question of colonial resistance to 
the English administration was most warmly de- 
bated. Franklin, in London, on his mission of 
peace and petition for justice, had been insulted 
by Wedderburn in the face of the British minis- 
try.^ The supercilious spirit was to be met with 
defiance and resistance. The Boston Tea-Party 
had suited the action to its word ; the word to its 

1 January 29th, 1874. The famous hearing at " The Cockpit " 
on the Hutchinson petition will be found best related in the 2d vol., 
p. 186, of The Life of Betijai?iin Franklin, edited by the Hon. John 
Bigelow, late our minister to France. 
4 



50 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

action. The Boston Port " Bill " had been denied 
the respect and force of law. Voices came from 
high places in England strengthening the purpose 
of the colonists. Chatham had publicly " rejoiced" 
in the House of Lords, " that the colonies re- 
sisted ; " and Burke urged the Commons that 
America be conciliated, and told them that " in- 
vention was exhausted ; reason was fatigued ; ex- 
perience had given judgment ; but obstinacy was 
not yet conquered."^ Camden, Fox, and others, 
openly sustained the resistance to the taxation as 
just and constitutional. These illustrious men 
declared that they spake under the sanction, and 
in support of the principles of English liberty. 
Burke emphasized the disposition and facility with 
which the American intellect searched to the very 
substance of the nature of things, moral and po- 
litical. The writings of Hobbes of Malmsbury, 
Harrington, John Locke, Sydney, and the " Pat- 
riot King" of Bolingbroke, were widely read. 
While at Elizabethtown Hamilton became ac- 
quainted with Governor Livingston, Elias Boudi- 

^ Exordium to his speech on American Taxation, delivered 
April 19, 1774. Towards the close of the session of 1775, Ed- 
mund Burke, after three months' almost daily discussion of Amer- 
ican affairs, presented a remonstrance from New York — hitherto a 
quiet and loyal colony — upon the harshness shown to her sister 
colonies. It met with a like reception from the minister as other 
innumerable petitions and agents did from Lords, Commons, and 
Privy Council : that is, few were received and none deigned to be 
answered. — Prior's Life of Burke, vol. i, p. 312. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 51 

not, and their families ; and had the propitious 
advantage of educated and refined society, and of 
sincere friends. In Boston his social intercourse 
was of a like kind. What he heard and saw there 
inclined him to study the history and principles of 
the contest. He did it with his habitual research 
and reflection. On his return to New York he 
soon became master of its fact and philosophy, as 
well as of a clear and authentic knowledge of the 
resolutions and acts of the British Parliament, re- 
lating to America subsequent to the peace of 1 763 ; 
and of the proceedings of the British ministry to 
enforce them. His recent intercourse with people 
had already convinced him of the determined op- 
position with which these acts were met, and to 
be met, on the part of the people of the colonies. 
More serious claims were at this critical moment 
presented by the parliament ; more serious oppres- 
sions threatened. The twelve colonies, which were 
spread over the vast space from Nova Scotia to 
Georgia, took alarm, and began to interchange 
opinions and projects to unite in appointing dele- 
gates " with authority and direction to meet and 
consult together for the common welfare." 

Such a Congress was to meet at Philadelphia in 
September, 1774, and then and there was con- 
summated a permanent union of the colonies 
which prepared the way, under the force of com- 
ing events, for the ultimate declaration of inde- 



52 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

pendence. It was at a meeting held on July 
6th, in the city of New York, to aid this project, 
that Hamilton made his first public appearance as 
an orator. The meeting was in the open fields, 
and attended by the most worthy citizens who 
were opposed to the course of the government. 
Well known orators had spoken to the assembly. 
Hamilton was among the audience. Under an 
impulse of the moment he ascended the hustings, 
and, with calm, earnest words, held the attention 
of the people. They marveled at the eloquence 
and mature sense of that which the unknown 
youth said. It was marked by the qualities of his 
later time, — deliberateness, clearness, warmth, and 
reason. From that period Hamilton, then sev- 
enteen years old, was a public and notable man. 
The work of his life was upon him. 

Two pamphlets on the proceedings of the Con- 
tinental Congress were published and distributed 
gratuitously among the people. They were writ- 
ten for the cause of the crown, and were marked 
with unusual ability. The advocates of the colo- 
nial cause felt the cogency of the arguments ; vio- 
lent discussion ensued ; disturbances in public 
places ; and, so little control had these folks over 
their anger, that copies of the pamphlets were 
tarred and feathered and nailed to the common 
pillory. Within two weeks from the first appear- 
ance of those pamphlets an answer came forth. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 53 

The tide of popular feeling was changed. The 
patriot party was delighted, and was thankful for 
the chance which gave the opportunity for such 
a satisfactory exposition and vindication of their 
colonial rights as English subjects. The contro- 
versy in writing went on, pamphlet answering 
pamphlet. The thoughts, learning, and style indi- 
cated that the answers had been the work of some 
one of the ablest men of the day; and to none 
but such as Governor Livingston and John Jay 
was the authorship ascribed. When a lad of nine- 
teen years old was discovered to be the author, 
incredulity was pardonable. Indeed, only irre- 
fragable evidence convinced those who doubted. 
As an orator and as a political writer, Hamilton 
was now before the people. 

Samuel Seabury — a name to become known 
and venerated more than once in the American 
Church and honored in both hemispheres — was, 
in connection with Mr. Wilkins, another clergy- 
man, the principal author of those two addresses 
" for the crown." He was a stout churchman, of 
most vigorous intellect, strong convictions, and, by 
those convictions, a loyalist. Afterwards he was 
the first Bishop of the American Church, and was 
consecrated at Longeau, Aberdeen, on Sunday, 
November 14th, 1784, by Bishop Kilgour, Primus, 
Bishop Petrie, and Bishop Skinner, of the Church 
of Scotland, who described themselves in the 



54 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

Concordat, then made with the American Bishop, 
as " of the CathoHc remainder of the ancient 
Church of Scotland."^ His remains are buried 
in the crypt, beneath St. James's Church, New 
London, in the State of Connecticut, honored by 
the marbled reverence of that diocese of which he 
was the first bishop, and by a people who had im- 
prisoned him for fidelity to his unpopular political 
principles and to his sincere allegiance. 

The War for Independence was now upon the 
country. In May, 1775, another Congress was 
assembled, also at Philadelphia. It was invested 
with full powers to take care, according to its own 
discretion, of the liberties of the land. Georgia 
came into the confederacy, and the union then 
comprehended the whole thirteen colonies. Hos- 
tilities had actually begun in the Province of Mas- 
sachusetts. The appeal to arms was made. A 
declaration of the reasons and necessity for taking 
up arms was proclaimed; and on July 3d, 1775, 
Washington, by commission from the Congress, 
took command of the American Army at Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts. His headquarters were in 
the mansion to-day the residence of the poet 
Longfellow. Event followed event rapidly. The 

^ The writer is not aware that this important document has been 
printed. The words quoted have been copied from the original 
now in possession of the Rev. William J. Seabury, D. D., of New 
York, a great grandson of the Bishop. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 55 

people intended to protect their freedom as Brit- 
ish subjects from the oppressions of a British min- 
istry. They meant to do as a people what Eng- 
lish barons and prelates had done at Runnymede.^ 

^ From Hallam's View of the State of Europe during the Mid- 
dle Ages (vol. 2, pp. 323, 324), I quote the following reflections, to 
show that that which we call "progress " is, in historical truth, a 
recurrence to those primary principles from which nations have 
wandered, or have been driven by usurpation. There is not an im- 
portant moral or political reformation related in history but has 
been equally an assertion and reestablishment of an ancient well- 
ordered freedom, and a manifestation of a living power. " One is 
surprised," says Hallam, " at the forbearance displayed by the 
barons, till they took up arms at length in that confederacy, which 
ended in establishing the Great Charter of Liberties. As this was 
the first effort towards a legal government, so it is beyond compar- 
ison the most important event in our history, except that Rt/olu- 
tion, without which its benefits would have been rapidly annihi- 
lated All that has since been obtained is little more than 

as confirmation or commentary ; and if every subsequent law were 
to be swept away, there would still remain the bold features that 

distinguish a free from a despotic monarchy An equal 

distribution of civil rights to all classes of freemen, forms the pe- 
culiar beauty of the charter. In this just solicitude for the people, 
and in the moderation which infringed upon no essential preroga- 
tive of the monarchy, we may perceive a liberality and patriotism 
very unlike the selfishness which is sometimes rashly imputed to 
those ancient barons. And, as far as we are guided by historical 
testimony, two great men, the pillars of our church and state, may 
be considered as entitled beyond the rest to the glory of this monu- 
ment ; Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William, 
Earl of Pembroke. To their temperate zeal for a legal government, 
England was indebted during that critical period for the two great- 
est blessings that patriotic statesmen could confer : the establish- 
ment of civil liberty upon an immovable basis, and the preservation 
of national independence." 

Those who wish to pursue thoughts on an associate theme, as 



56 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

The principle of the Revolution of 1688 was within 
their understanding and appreciation, and had pre- 
pared the Englishry throughout the colonies to 
know their rights.^ But there was a Providence 
shaping their ends. The infant colonies were, in 
three epochs of growth, — the revolutionary, the 
confederate, the constitutional, — to become the 
Republic ; they had, as Montesquieu observes, 
" grown great nations in the forest they were sent 
to inhabit." 

July 4, 1776, came. The United Colonies, in 
convention, at Philadelphia, declared with one 
consent, in the name and by the authority of the 
people, that all allegiance and political connection 
between them and the British crown had totally 

just in principle as they are eloquent and correct in expression, 
will receive great pleasure and edification from reading the sermon 
of Canon Liddon on " The Law of Progress." — University Ser- 
mons, p. 25. 

^ " They were affectionate to the people of England, zealous and 
forward to assist in her wars, by voluntary contributions of men 
and money, even beyond their proportion. The King and Parlia- 
ment had frequently acknowledged this by public messages, reso- 
lutions, and reimbursements. But they were equally fond of what 
they esteemed their rights ; and, if they resisted when those were 
attacked, it was a resistance in favor of a British Constitution, 
which every EngHshman might share in enjoying, who should come 
to live among them ; it was resisting arbitrary impositions, that 
were contrary to common right and to their fundamental constitu- 
tions, and to constant ancient usage. It was indeed a resistance in 
favor of the liberties of England, which might have been endan- 
gered by success in the attempt against ours." — Life of Benjamin 
Franklin (Bigelow's edition), vol. 2, p. 316. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 57 

ceased ; and that the United Colonies assumed, as 
independent and free States, their place among na- 
tions as a nation. 

The war to maintain that declaration of inde- 
pendence and nationality was fought. By years 
of toil and sacrifice it was won. But it did not 
make nor leave the United Colonies a nation ; 
except in the presupposition which, by a sort of 
theory, enabled them to act as such in their first 
diplomatic negotiation with England. 

With the conduct of the war itself, and the 
part, important as it was, that Hamilton took in 
it; with his seven years of military service, and 
as " the chief adviser and aid of Washington " 
during that time, we are not to become specially 
interested in this study. It is the statesman — 
not the soldier nor jurist — that is to have our 
attention. 

It was on January 20, 1783, that peace was con- 
cluded, at Paris, between Great Britain and the 
United States. The American commissioners 
had loosed themselves from the surveillance of 
the Count de Vergennes and settled upon the 
preliminary conditions with the British agents 
in a manner creditable to the wisdom and the 
honor of both nations. Indeed, the dislike to 
have France act directly or indirectly in that nego- 
tiation, guided as she then was by the ambitious 
Vergennes, who had ulterior views of his own to 



58 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

chiefly serve, was shared by the English statesmen 
of all parties, as well as by the monarch himself. 
John Jay sympathized in this disposition of the 
English, from something he had heard from the 
French ambassador on their voyage together to 
Europe.^ 

Jay acted on the information received, and this 
inclination coincided with the purpose of Lord 
Shelburne, then at the head of the colonial ofifice. 
Shelburne wished to secure peace, or rather a truce, 
independently of the French intervention. Charles 
James Fox was the Secretary for Foreign Affairs. 
To his hands, as he supposed, the negotiation 
properly belonged. He was ignorant of Shel- 
burne's private, indirect, determination to take the 
matter into his own control, and of his secretly 
opening the subject to John Adams, at Amster- 
dam, the previous March. Fox was acting in his 
direct, frank, friendly way. Shelburne was aiming 
to deal with the States as distinctly colonies. The 
conduct of the States was encouraging uncon- 
sciously this project. Fox was advising that the 
negotiations be commenced by a recognition of the 
common independence of the United States. He 
was warm to an unusual degree, even above the 
customary license of Parliament. He continued 
to wear in the House of Commons what was be- 
ginning to be taken as the American uniform, buff 

^ Life of John Adams, vol. 2, p. 22. 



THE INDIVIDUAL, 59 

and blue ^ _ that mode which many persons still 
living will remember as the usual dress of Daniel 
Webster on occasions of professional arguments 
and of public significance. 

It was early in 1782 that the dawn of peace 
began to be discernible. How could peace be ne 
gotiated .? By the States in their form of confed- 
eration, or by each State for itself.? It was a vital 
pomt for America. She claimed that it must pro- 
ceed with the Foreign Office of Great Britain, and 
not with that of the colonies. The question had 
been anticipated by a council held by the British 
ministry. The way advised by Fox was not agreed 
to. Rockingham suddenly died. Shelburne had 
the control now, and the administration decided to 
treat with the successful States as " revolted colo- 
nies," and only with those. By this, as it was 
hoped, several of the colonies would be induced to 
continue adherents of the crown; and those others 
by being apart, and their jealousies encouraged' 
would lapse into anarchy. The design was sure- 
ly not without grounds for expectation to such 
as knew of the mutual strifes among the States 
Benjamin Frankhn was resident plenipotentiary to 
France, John Jay had left his mission to Spain 
John Adams his at Holland, and Henry Laurens 

J Prior's Life of Burke, vol. x, p. 353- Burke declined to adopt 
his un. orm as h,s ordinary dress in Parliament, and did not wear 
It except solicited to do so. 



6o ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

had come especially from the United States to as- 
sist in these negotiations of peace at Paris. Ham- 
ilton was requested to go upon that special mission. 
He declined, for he knew that a greater duty for 
him was at home. The Count de Vergennes had 
advised these commissioners to accede to the Shel- 
burne proposal. Those sagacious men declined 
to act on the weak, if not selfish counsel ; and 
they insisted that the United States were no 
longer colonies, but were a free and independent 
nation ; and to be acknowledged and treated with 
as a nation. A recital of the details which accom- 
panied this discussion would not elucidate the in- 
tent of our theme.^ But the commissioners felt 
that the very idea of nationality in the negotiation 
of a treaty was desirable and necessary. To the 
English, the point was one of procedure merely. 
Not so to the United States. The negotiation 
finally went on with the Office for Foreign Affairs. 
Those and other statesmen were not deceived. It 
was better policy though, just then, to act upon the 
apparent, rather than to insist upon the real, fact. 
To the exterior world the United States presented 
the semblance of unity. Between the States them- 
selves it was scarcely acknowledged. The unity 
of the States in any national sense was an empty 

1 Vol. 4 of the Life of Lord Shelburiie is about to be pub- 
lished. It should be very interesting in its history of the secret 
and devious policy of that minister during this period. 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 6 1 

theory. Pride, policy, and patriotism had nerved 
the American commissioners to insist on the ideal. 
But they knew, and intelligent people in Europe 
knew, that the thing itself did not exist. " To be 
more exposed in the eyes of the world, and more 
contemptible than we already are, is hardly pos- 
sible," were the words of anguish wrung from 
even the patience of Washington. 

Far otherwise was the effect of the American 
Revolution upon the imagination of the people 
generally in Europe. It fevered into false fancies. 
Those people had seen feeble, distant colonies, till 
then unknown, vindicate rights against a power 
upon whose dominions the sun never sets. The 
combat unequal, the success determinate. 

Peace had brought difficulties surpassing those 
of war. Those difficulties had become notorious. 
Even the people of Europe, of whom large num- 
bers had emigrated on the conclusion of the 
peace, began to see more clearly into the actual re- 
lation which affairs bore to each other. This and 
other disclosures came fully to pass before John 
Adams, in December, 1785, presented the memo- 
rial to the Court of St. James, urging a perfect 
compliance with certain articles of the treaty of 
peace. It seemed as if by the acquisition of in- 
dependence no substantial good results were to 
follow. The Confederation was the only compact 
made " to form a perfect union of the States, to 



62 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

establish justice, to insure tranquillity, and provide 
for the security of the nation." The epithet Union 
still commanded reverence, though not obedience. 
The public tranquillity was a portentous calm. A 
project for three confederate empires in America 
was beginning to be encouraged. Ambition was 
incited and nursed by the prospect of pronounced 
disunion. In the language of " The Federalist," 
"each State, yielding to the voice of immediate 
interest or convenience, successively withdrew its 
support from the Confederation, till the frail and 
tottering edifice was ready to fall upon our heads, 
and to crush us beneath its ruins." It was pro- 
claimed, and circumstances led to the belief, that 
the States had each achieved its independence for 
itself, — that the Confederation was a league offen- 
sive and defensive, but not a government. The 
States were unwilling to surrender that indepen- 
dence, and merge their existence into a common 
form, wherein each would lose its individuality, as 
water is in water. The general government held 
a barren sceptre. It could plead, but not enforce. 
It could give judgment, but had no means to exe- 
cute it. It was all head, and no arms. It could 
devise, but not perform. It could request the 
States, but not act upon the persons or property 
of the individual inhabitants. The State stood 
between the Confederation and the people. The 
general government had no fund, nor the power, 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 63 

in and by itself, to raise a fund. It had already 
borrowed and created public debts. They were 
due, and owing to domestic and foreign creditors. 
Yet the general government found itself without 
requisite authority to lay taxes, or, by imposts, to 
get in a revenue. The State governments sol- 
emnly declined to concede such powers, notwith- 
standing the pressure. A public credit of course 
could not exist ; no sort of valid assurance could 
be given to pay. Commercial jealousies and con- 
tentions among the States brought fearful bodings. 
Domestic peace was verily in danger. The gen- 
eral government, unable to respond to its vicari- 
ous liabilities, became the object of positive as- 
sault. The army clamored. The soldiers did not 
demand money, only that some reasonably sure 
provision might be made for ultimate payment. 
Congress was unable even to give this. The States 
refused to aid. The ofhcers of the army, which 
had gone into winter quarters, pending the nego- 
tiations of peace, were about to meet, with hostile 
intent, to obtain redress. The veterans felt the 
neglect. Their heroic sacrifices had passed into 
history, but not into the hearts of their country- 
men. Their simple, honest understandings could 
not distinguish between the Confederate Congress 
and the controlling power of the States, so as to 
appreciate where the blame should not be im- 
puted. Washington, acting on the urgent advice 



64 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

of Hamilton, did not allow the proposed meeting 
to take place. He acted with characteristic firm- 
ness and decision, and summoned the general and 
field .oflficers to assemble together, giving their 
consultation a regular authority and orderly ap- 
pearance. They assembled on Saturday, March 15, 
1 783. General Gates, restored to his command in 
the army, as its senior officer, presided. Knox 
and Putnam were there. The latter had fought 
at Bunker Hill. Washington stood in the midst 
of his old companions in arms. The tableau is 
one of the most affecting in the history of the 
war. It was certainly at one of its most moment- 
ous crises. Washington had in the mean time 
been truly informed " that the army had recently 
determined not to lay down their arms until due 
provision and a satisfactory prospect should be 
afforded on the subject of their pay ; . . . . and 
that plans had been agitated, if not formed, for 
subsisting themselves after such declaration." He 
read a prepared address. On one, and but on 
one, other occasion was his heart to be again so 
tenderly moved. He was unable to preserve his 
composure. Tears were obscuring his vision, and 
it was with difficulty he read. " Fellow-soldiers," 
he said, " you perceive I have not only grown 
gray, but blind in your service." Having finished 
the address he immediately withdrew, so as to 
leave the officers unembarrassed by his presence 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 65 

in their deliberations. They declared, without 
dissent, that they would "still place confidence in 
the justice of Congress and of their country." 
The impending storm was subdued. Washington 
wrote a letter to Congress appealing to its sense of 
justice. The appeal was to an empty, hopelessly 
bankrupt treasury ; to a Congress with no power 
to fill it; to States too jealous of a national gov- 
ernment to make the grant. The " justice " of the 
country slept on, undisturbed by any emotions of 
gratitude ; the claims of the soldiers were pushed 
aside, and then forgotten. The Continental Army 
ceased to exist. The troops returned to their 
poverty-stricken homes. Happy the patriot who 
falls upon the field of glory. Rather the death of 
Leonidas than the doom of Belisarius. 

Washington resigned, at Annapolis, Maryland, 
on December 23, 1783, into the hands of the Con- 
gress, the authority which it had invested him with 
in 1775. He was saluted by nations as the Fabius 
and the Epaminondas of the age. Thebes fell with 
Epaminondas ; but the country of Washington was 
to endure, despite the troubles which were now 
clouding down upon it. The people of America 
had passed through two forms and stages in the 
course of their governmental growth. First, the 
revolutionary; second, the confederate; and now 
the third, the constitutional, was in its devel- 
opment. The uses of adversity never showed 

5 



66 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

sweeter nor more prolific of good. The passions 
of pride and selfishness in the dissociate States 
were impelling them into that consolidation which 
they wished to escape. The parent idea of union 
could not be annihilated, nor its urgency be over- 
come. It had recurred again and again from the 
time when first the Colonies were planted. It was 
of the essence of American colonial life. The 
Colonies clung to it during the Revolution ; fit- 
fully and fretfully tolerated it during the Confed- 
eration. A constitution and a perfect union were 
among the things inevitable within the pressure 
of the circumstances. The Confederation had died 
out. In the southern States, when a blight comes 
over the cotton field and all seems destroyed and 
gone forever, the people there say, " it has died 
out to a stand." That, only, which is corruptible 
and perishable has gone : the living principle from 
which shall spring a new and prosperous crop has 
not perished. It will bloom again in renovated 
strength at the future season. It had but died 
out to a stand ; and that stand was made, in the 
sensitive economy of nature, at the vital part 
where the power of renewing lay in its concen- 
trated and imperishable energy. A beautiful an- 
alogy of Resurrection and Life. 

The Confederation had, indeed, died out. The 
energy from which a new, a great and adequate 
national government was to grow, lay treasured 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 67 

and secured amid that which appeared but decay 
and death. Hamilton intelHgently awaited its 
earliest and expected manifestation ; and then 
cultured it to a pristine health. The develop- 
ment of that parent idea of union will be related 
in the succeeding part of this historical study. 

Without the credit of a nation abroad, without 
the strength of a nation at home, the work for the 
new Constitution was begun and accomplished. 
A few, a very few, hopeful, earnest, and able men 
brought the blessing of good and national govern- 
ment upon the country. The general Convention 
at Philadelphia, September 17, 1787, had fulfilled 
its trust, and proposed for acceptance a constitu- 
tion of government for the States. The following 
are its introductory words : " We, the people of the 
United States, in order to form a more perfect 
Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tran- 
quillity, provide for the common Defence, promote 
the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of 
Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain 
and estabhsh this CONSTITUTION for the 
United States of America." Hamilton is the 
author of that declaratory preface. 

Washington had presided at that general Con- 
vention. His patriotism again strengthened the 
hearts and hope of those who wished well to 
the new system for a union. It was to the char- 
acter of Washington, as it ever had been since 



68 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

the efforts for independence and a republican form 
of government began, that the Nationahsts turned 
when the cause of the Union grew weak. The 
country had no other single thing which was so 
sure to hold the confidence of all, and in whose 
presence passions subsided and jealous interests 
felt that they were safe. To be sure, there were 
other men. The men, whose talents and wisdom 
Chatham had compared to the choicest instances 
in history, had not all retired from public life. 
The places of those who had retired were filled 
by new men whose names were to become alike 
illustrious. Hamilton and Madison were of the 
latter. The political heavens were certainly aglow 
with lights throughout its widest space ; but each 
led its own host, and was conspicuous as the 
leader of a particular constellation. Washington 
stood alone; less brilliant than others, but ever 
fixed in his place. The brightest stars are not 
the safest guide — the north star guides though 
others lead astray. 

It was late in the autumn of 1787. Hamilton 
was then, as we have seen, silently concentrating 
his power and preparing himself for the Conven- 
tion about to assemble at Poughkeepsie to deliber- 
ate upon the adoption of the proposed Constitution. 
The future of America was with the People. To 
them he spoke. They were the source of and ave- 
nue to legitimate power. Government must rest 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 69 

on the consent of the governed in its first instance. 
After that the law, prescribed, dominates. That 
the People might be instructed in their political 
capacity, and in the nature of the work to be 
brought before that Convention, he commenced 
the addresses to them known as " The Federalist." 
No one was more competent either by knowledge, 
by talents, by wisdom, by faith in republican in- 
stitutions, by patriotism, to give that instruction. 
In the language of that accomplished French 
statesman Guizot, " there is not in the Constitu- 
tion of the United States an element of order, of 
force, of duration, which he has not powerfully 
contributed to introduce into it and to cause to 
predominate." 

Such was Alexander Hamilton, upon the his- 
tory of whose deeds as a statesman we now pur- 
pose to enter. 



APPENDIX. 



EXTRACT FROM CHANCELLOR KENT S ADDRESS BEFORE THE 
LAW ASSOCIATION, NEW YORK, OCTOBER 21, 1836. 

" Among his brethren Hamilton was indisputably preemi- 
nent This was universally conceded. He rose at once to 
the loftiest heights of professional eminence, by his profound 
penetration, his power of analysis, the comprehensive grasp 
and strength of his understanding, and the firmness, frank- 
ness, and integrity of his character. We may say of him, in 
reference to his associates, as was said of Papinian, omnes 
longo post se mtervallo reliquerit. A few reminiscences of the 
display of his genius and eloquence inay not be uninteresting 
to the gentlemen I have now the honor to address. 

"In January, 1785, I attended, for the first time, a term of 
the Supreme Court, and Mr. Hamilton, in an interesting case 
then brought to a hearing, commanded great attention and 
applause by his powers of argument and oratory. 

" In the case I allude to. Chancellor Livingston claimed 
lands to a large amount in value, and lying on the north part 

of the County of Dutchess He carried his cause, as 

it were, by a coup-de-main, and obtained a verdict rather by 
the force of his character, and the charm of his eloquence, 
than by the weight of evidence. In the January term follow- 
ing, a new trial was moved for, on the ground that the ver- 
dict was against evidence. I had the pleasure of being 
present at the argument, and a witness to the contest of 



72 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

genius and eloquence between Chancellor Livingston and 
Colonel Hamilton, the master-spirits who controlled all hearts 
on that occasion, — the one contending for a new trial and 

the other resisting it The tall and graceful figure 

of Chancellor Livingston, and his polished wit and classical 
taste, contributed not a little to deepen the impression re- 
sulting from the ingenuity of his argument, the vivacity' of his 
imagination, and the dignity of his station. 

" Mr. Hamilton was then at the age of twenty-seven, and 
he had never met and encountered such a distinguished oppo- 
nent. He appeared to be agitated by intense thought. His 
eyes, his lips, and his pen, were in rapid motion during the 
Chancellor's address. He rose with firmness and dignity, 
and spoke for perhaps two hours in support of his motion. 
His reply was fluent, argumentative, ardent, and accom- 
panied with great emphasis of manner and expression. It 
was marked for a searching analysis of the case, and a 
master}^ of all the law and learning suitable to the subject. 
.... I have always regarded Mr. Hamilton's argument, 
near the close of his life, in the celebrated Crosswell case, as 
the greatest forensic effort he ever made. The subject was 
grave, and of lofty import. It related to the liberty of the 
press, and to the right of the jury in a criminal case, under 
the general issue, to determine the law as well as the fact. 
He never, in any case at the bar, commanded higher rev- 
erence for his principles, or equal admiration of the power 
and pathos of his eloquence. But we have not time to en- 
large on that case ; and it will be more interesting, as an 
example of the mighty powers of that great man, to take a 
general view of his efforts on a broader theatre, and not only 
as a lawyer but as a statesman, before a very dignified 
assembly, and upon the highest and noblest topics of jDolit- 
ical discussion that ever arose in this State. I am the more 
willing to recur to that history because I am apprehensive 
that the scanty memorials of the exhibition of Mr. Hamil- 



APPENDIX. 7- 

ton's talents on that occasion are going fast into oblivion I 
allude to the Convention which assembled at Pou-hkeepsie 
m the summer of 1788, to deliberate and decide on the adop- 
tion of the Federal Constitution. The intense interest with 
which the meeting of the Convention was anticipated and 
regarded can hardly be conceived at this day, and much less 
adequately described. I then resided in that villa^^e and 
was enabled and induced to attend the Convention 'as a 
spectator, daily and steadily during the entire six weeks of 
Its session, and I was of course an eye and ear witness to 
everythmg of a public nature that was said or done The ' 
Convention was composed of sixty-five members, and not one • 
of them remains a survivor at this day. That bright and 
golden age of the Republic may now be numbered 'with the 
years beyond the flood,' and I am left in comparative soli- 
tude." 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON 



A HISTORICAL STUDY 

PART II 
THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE 



BY THE 

I 

HONORABLE GEORGE SHEA 

CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE MARINE COURT 






NEW YORK 

PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON 

BOSTON: H.O.HOUGHTON AND COMPANY 

€/arai»:ilifie: W^t EiDersiiie ^xtm 

1878 



ox 



Ht.^^ 



Copyright, 1878, 
By GEORGE SHEA. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 

H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



1^ 



To 

CHARLES MAURICE, 

MARQUIS DE TALLEYRAND-PERIGORD, 

NAMESAKE AND HEIR TO THE PROUDEST TITLE OF THAT GREAT PRINCE WHO WAS THE 

COMPANION AND FRIEND OF HAMILTON, 

THE FOLLOWING PAGES, TREATING OF THE HISTORICAL INDUCEMENTS TO 

NATIONAL UNITY, 

ARE DEDICATED, 

AS A SOUVENIR OF OUR OWN LONG FRIENDSHIP, 

AND OF THOSE DAYS WHICH WE HAVE SPENT TOGETHER IN AMERICA AND IN FRANCE; 

BUT CHIEFLY IN RECOGNITION AND PRAISE 

OF HIS INTELLIGENT EFFORTS AND PATRIOTIC SACRIFICES 

TO BRING TO THE FRENCH PEOPLE 

A KNOWLEDGE OF THOSE PRINCIPLES OF PERFECT FREEDOM 

AND OBEDIENCE TO SOVEREIGN LAW, 

THE POWER AND WORTH OF WHICH HAVE BEEN ILLUSTRATED BY THE PROSPERITY 
OF THE 

AMERICAN STATES IN EMPIRE, 



PART II. 

THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 



PART II. 

THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 

An experiment of a new form of government, 
unknown to the science of politics, was to be tried 
in a new land and under new social conditions. 
Afar, alike, from the influence and pressure of un- 
republican systems, with over three thousand miles 
of stormy seas rolling between America and Eu- 
rope, the new experiment was to take its own un- 
embarrassed way. Those who ardently wished its 
success, and strove to ensure success, had reason 
not to expect it. They did not conceal their 
fears. The problem involved an expedient by 
which two governments might each be distinct- 
ively supreme within the same territory and over 
the same people. The proposition seemed a para- 
dox ; but the man who " divined Europe " had 
discovered a plan, in accord with a true republican 
system, by which the idea could be brought into 
practice, and such a duality work out the functions 
of good government within those novel circum- 
stances of conflicting interests and prejudices. 
The "democratic" was to be placed under a re- 
public. 



78 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

The general government of the Confederation 
needed an inherently permanent capability to get 
means for its own support ; authority to regulate 
commerce between the States and with foreign 
countries ; to be strengthened throughout all its 
parts ; to have an executive chief, and to be en- 
abled to enforce performance of its legitimate 
mandates by due process of law. These powers 
were not simply convenient, but were found nec- 
essary to the continuance of the general govern- 
ment. This was not controvertible. Great bar- 
riers were in the path, and those barriers had first 
to be removed or reconciled before anything like 
a national Congress could be allowed the required 
authority. It was evident to some that, while the 
Articles of Confederation continued in existence, 
the authority would not be conceded by the States. 
Historical prejudices and the selfishness of local 
interests were against such concessions. Tra- 
ditional dread of centralized government ; tradi- 
tional dread of a hereditary aristocracy ; dread 
that a national legislature, if allowed full authority, 
might assert and act upon the repudiated doctrine 
of an omnipotence of Parliament ; dread that a su- 
preme general government might absorb, or even 
usurp in the guise of the public welfare, those 
local interests which the States were now able to 
maintain, and which the Confederation was meant 
to protect : — the concurrence of these several 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 79 

causes contributed to bring out the ever recur- 
ring opposition to any measure for increasing the 
powers of the Congress ; especially, whenever the 
measure proceeded from the Congress itself. The 
successful, conclusive proposition, which, so far as 
the States were in the beginning concerned, con- 
ducted, by unpremeditated steps, to the formation 
of a new form of government, was, in the end, to 
come, as we shall see, from the States themselves : 
though grudgingly and tardily. The nature and 
the history of those elementary impediments to a 
national union are interesting, and are, also, valu- 
able to our purpose, as they will disclose the spirit 
which had to be disciplined, subdued, and concil- 
iated. 

Many of the colonies in North America had 
a traditional dread of centralized government. 
They liked to dwell apart and for themselves. 
Encompassing danger impelled them to gather 
together ; they adhered to the common cause 
while the danger pressed upon them, and then fell 
back as they were before. 

The initiatory immigration into Virginia came 
out of a patriotic party in England, and was like 
an offering by the genius of English liberty, which 
may not have safely been risked at home, in the 
age of Elizabeth.^ The descendants, and many 

^ A searching, full, and accurate history of the several colonial 
foundations in America, is contained in the first volume, recently 



8o ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

other successors of those early immigrants, pre- 
served and fostered their ancestral political bent. 
Huguenots composed the first body of men who 
came to America to find permanent habitations. 
Spaniards had destroyed their colony. A bold 
English attempt had been made by Sir Walter 
Raleigh and his adventurous consociates to rival 
the Spaniards in planting colonies in America. 
The salubrity of the climate, the richness of the 
soil, the lovely and superb nature of the varied land 
quickly caught their approving sense. Though 
Raleigh's attempts came to naught, his brilliant 
example encouraged others to prosperous under- 
takinsfs. It is curious to reflect how his zeal 
against the extension of Spanish dominion was, 
at length, to furnish an excuse for, though not 
the immediate cause of, his own violent death. 
Huguenots continued, at different times, to take 
refuge, in great numbers, throughout many of the 
colonies, and their fearful anxiety fused with the 
anxiety of all others adverse to the doctrines tend- 
ing to centralization. 

Hollanders had settled (i 629-1 635) in that re- 
gion of country which became, under the English, 
the Province of New York ; and the City of New 

published, of the Popular History of the United States, written by 
William CuUen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay. It satisfacto- 
rily fills an important place too long vacant in our standard litera- 
ture. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 8 1 

Amsterdam arose upon the island of Manhattan 
where the confluent waters of two beneficent rivers 
pour their deep and full stream toward the ocean. 
The chief island of its magnificent bays kept in 
the memory, by its name of " The Staaten Island," 
a durable memorial of the fatherland ; and, by the 
names which they gave to villages, these colonists 
indulged their filial love in a more special degree 
by such titles as New Dorp, and by calling the 
estuary that divides the island from the main 
shore the Kill von Kull ; and, likewise, where up 
the river its waters expand into the broader Tap- 
pan Zee. Along the banks and through the valleys 
of the Hudson, and those of the Delaware, and of 
other regions within those territories now known 
as Pennsylvania and New Jersey went the sturdy 
pioneers from the lowlands of the German Ocean. 
Throughout New York the Dutchman was still 
conspicuously active in promoting public affairs, 
of weight in counsel, and prominent in its high 
places of renown and honor, at the time when the 
Constitution for the new nation was about to be 
laid, in the summer of 1788, before the Conven- 
tion to be held at Poughkeepsie. 

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes (Octo- 
ber, 1685) set a strong current of Huguenot im- 
migration into the Province of New York, and the 
town of New Rochelle, the Huguenot Park, and 
the peculiar Huguenot burial places in Westches- 



82 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

ter County, together with the patronymics of many 
of its principal inhabitants and pubHc men, be- 
speak the prevalence in that part of the province 
of a portion of the half million of people who were 
driven by the Edict from their native France, and 
wdio found open hospitable arms and permanent 
homes in the Electorate of Brandenberg and 
among the new plantations of the Western Hemi- 
sphere. These Dutch and Huguenots were of 
daring, enduring spirit and of stubborn material ; 
hard to shape and to render capable of entertain- 
ins: schemes for a " solid union." These men 
were of an impassioned nature not to be violently 
encountered in matters concerning government in 
church or in state ; not to be reasoned with on 
those matters, for their opinions were colored and 
shaded in a resistful atmosphere of prejudice arising 
from sufferings and passions. Interest intensified 
and upheld that prejudice; and greater interest 
only could meet and disperse it. Tales and mem- 
ories of what had been done by Philip H. and by 
Louis XIV. were of a kind not likely to prepare 
the mind of either Hollander or Huguenot to ac- 
cept as true the assertion that strength in central- 
ized authority was beneficial to the people. This 
temper gained strength and increase from the in- 
fluence of the body of immigrants which came 
from Sweden, and in April, 1638, settled upon the 
banks of the Delaware River. The teachings of 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 83 

Gustavus Adolphus, already sanctified to them by 
his death at the battle of Lutzen, warmed their 
principles and nerved their hearts. The pitcher 
had been broken,-^ but the well from which were 
drawn freshening drafts was not dry at its abun- 
dant source. Ambition was not wanting to the 
purposes of the Swedish king. He fostered the 
hope that a colony of Swedes should take a place 
among those nationalities which were peopling 
" the new promised land ;" extending Swedish do- 
minion, and opening an asylum there for such of 
his countrymen as were wearied and broken by the 
earlier struggles of that most disastrous of wars 
which for thirty years exhausted the energies of 
Germany. Oxenstiern was mindful of this ambi- 
tious intention of his dead friend and king, and 
organized and sent forth the emigrants who came 
to the Delaware. They thrived and grew and 
strengthened, until their individuality, hke that of 
others, became mixed in with those flooding waves 
of various popular immigrations, almost effacing 
the distinctive lines which once strongly marked 
the land, and which, embracing all together, com- 
pose the agglomerate people which were at length 
brought under the government of the new Re- 
public. 

^ Gustavus Adolphus loved to use homely proverbs. That most 
familiar with him was: "The pitcher goes often to the well, but it 
is broken at last." 



84 ALEXANDER HAMILTON, 

The Puritans, more conspicuously those of the 
Colony of Massachusetts, had grown more and 
more averse to consolidated governmental power, 
no matter where it was lodged. Sir Henry Vane, 
when governor of that colony, could not induce 
them to inaugurate any " home rule " which com- 
bined with it an aristocratic element. Several 
English peers offered, if the General Council of 
Massachusetts was divided into two chambers, to 
take seats there, by their own hereditary right, and 
make a common government with the Puritans 
for the ancient colony. The dislike of those col- 
onists was not to the aristocracy as a political es- 
tate : the dislike was to its continuous and heredi- 
tary character. Puritans were not opposed to 
social and political gradations in the state. Their 
sublime poet declares in his grand harmonious 
numbers that 

" Orders and degrees 
Jar not with liberty, but well consist." ^ 

A supplementary suggestion followed this made by 
Vane, to the purport, that, if the nobles were to 
lessen their estate to simply a life-tenure, its hered- 
itary character then being gone, the offer might be 
considered. The effect of this scheme was to limit 
the tenure of all kinds of public offices in New 
England to very short periods. The inconven- 
iences and expense of frequent elections were es- 

1 Milton. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 85 

teemed as nothing in comparison with the sense 
of security which resulted. This feehng has never 
departed from the people of America. Their con- 
fidence in the character of Washington and affec- 
tionate respect for his patriotism and public ser- 
vices reconciled them as to him, but as to him 
alone, when he was reelected, and when it was pro- 
posed to elect him for a third term.^ Jefferson 
looked upon the Constitution as radically defective 
in not prohibiting the reelection of the same per- 
son to the presidency. Hamilton believed that 
the continuity of the same person in the highest 
executive national office ^ould give a needed sta- 
bility to the administration of government, and 
be more in accord with the principles of a repub- 
lican form, and as commended by its most ap- 
proved and illustrious instances. The Republic 
of Uri was such an instance. 

" A church without a bishop — a state without 
a king," was the thought underlying all their po- 
litical, social, and religious philosophy and action. 
Edmund Burke, when remarking that these peo- 
ple were Protestants, in his speech on Concili- 
ation with America, says, they are " of that which 
is the most adverse to all implicit submission of 
mind and opinion. I do not think that the reason 
of this averseness in the dissenting churches, from 
all that looks like absolute government, is so much 

^ Marshall's Life of Washington, vol. 2, page 395. 



86 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their 
history." Indeed, during the revolutionary and 
confederative periods there was no executive chief 
to the general government. It was a league of 
States and a people without a common executive 
head. This deep-seated conviction, that any he- 
reditary rank and political estate, in which power 
and privilege may lodge, or secrete, were essen- 
tially inimical to the continuance of the liberty of 
the people, had, in a most violent manner, quite 
recently shown itself. The " Society of the Cin- 
cinnati "was organized in May, 1783, just after 
the close of the war. The officers of the disbanded 
army intended by it to keep alive, consecrate, and 
perpetuate the memory of sacrifices made and 
friendships perfected during that war. The honor 
of membership was to be hereditary and to de- 
scend to the heir as a cherished loom. Washing- 
ton had consented to be its President. Now came 
down upon the society a storm of alarm, indigna- 
tion and abuse, which did not spare even Wash- 
ington. He and his fellow veterans in arms were 
innocent of any cause for offense. It was the in- 
cident of membership being hereditary that had 
aroused the dormant old prejudice. The society 
was stigmatized as a subtle design to introduce an 
aristocracy, subvert the republic, and institute a 
monarchy. Few occurrences had ever so excited 
violent passion ; voices, private pamphlets, and the 



TH'E FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 87 

public press, all at once, denounced the society as 
a public enemy. Mirabeau thought the occasion 
so important that he entered into the conflict, and 
published in England a pamphlet on the subject 
of hereditary nobility, which he had in great part 
prepared at Paris before he left there in August, 
1786.^ It was full of eloquent condemnation, and 
had so much the approbation of Franklin that 
Mirabeau bore a letter from him, dated at Passey, 
to his friend Mr. Vaughan, commending the Count 
to the civilities and counsel of that gentleman, re- 
specting the printing of the pamphlet in London, 
as it could not be printed in France. 

The Congress of the Confederation was a single 
body; and, so, it was looked upon as neither a 
provident nor a safe custodian of supreme author- 
ity over sovereign States. It was best for the 
nation and for the States, many thought, that such 
single bodies should remain advisory councils. 
Besides this, the omnipotence of Parliament had 
become an intolerable doctrine to the people of 
America. " It had done its work and outlived its 
usefulness."^ The principles of the Revolution of 
1688 continued ever dear to them ; but the domi- 
neering height to which the supremacy of legisla- 
tive power had ascended in England since 1688, 

^ Memoirs of Mirabeau,hy Himself, vol. 4, images 133-139. 
2 Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. 10, page 39. 



88 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

far beyond a reasonable, prudent, and beneficent 
use, seemed a warning not to permit a like source 
of aggressive authority to be gained by the Con- 
gress. Blackstone's " Commentaries " had been 
widely read. It was known how rapid and luxu- 
riant was the growth of delegated power. " I have 
been told by an eminent bookseller," said Edmund 
Burke to the House of Commons, March 22, 1775, 
" that in no branch of his business, after tracts of 
popular devotion, were so many books as those on 
the law exported to the plantations. The colonists 
have now fallen into the way of printing them for 
their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly 
as many of ' Blackstone's Commentaries ' in Amer- 
ica as in England." These Commentaries amplify 
and affirm the opinion of Sir Edward Coke, that 
the power and jurisdiction of Parliament is so 
transcendent and absolute, that it cannot be con- 
fined either for causes or persons within any 
bounds. " It has sovereign and uncontrollable au- 
thority, .... this being the place where that, ab- 
solute despotic power, which must in all govern- 
ments reside somewhere, is intrusted by the 
constitution of these kingdoms. All mischiefs and 
grievances, operations, and remedies, that tran- 
scend the ordinary course of the laws, are within 
the reach of this extraordinary tribunal. It can 
regulate or new model the succession to the Crown, 
as was done in the reign of Henry VIII. and Wil- 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 89 

Ham III. It can alter the established religion of 
the land, as was done in a variety of instances, in 
the reigns of King Henry VIII. and his three chil- 
dren. It can change and create afresh even the 
constitution of the kingdom and of parliaments 
themselves. It can, in short, do everything that 
is not naturally impossible ; and, therefore, some 
have not scrupled to call its power, by a figure 
rather too bold, the omnipotence of Parliament. 
True it is, that what the Parliament does no au- 
thority upon earth can undo. ... It was a known 
apophthegm of the great Treasurer Burleigh, 
* That England could never be ruined but by a 
Parliament; ' and Sir Matthew Hale observes, this 
being the highest and greatest court, over which 
none other can have jurisdiction in the kingdom, 
if by any means a misgovernment should in any 
way fall upon it, the subjects of this kingdom are 

left without all manner of remedy So long, 

therefore, as the English Constitution lasts, we may 
venture to affirm, that the power of Parliament is 
absolute and without control."^ Whether this 
comment by Blackstone professes too much or not, 
is little to the purpose of our present inquiry. It 
was the doctrine taught by the most popular au- 
thoritative elementary law-writer of England ; ut- 
tered by him to the rising generation of students 
in the University of Oxford, and to the nobility 

1 Blackstone's Commentaries^ vol. i, pp. 161-162. 



90 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

and gentlemen of England, as late as 1758; and 
the colonists naturally accepted it as an exposition 
of the true nature of legislative power, when placed 
in any assembly with sovereign authority ; and it 
was the doctrine solemnly and ostentatiously pro- 
claimed and acted upon by parliaments whose 
acts immediately preceded and necessitated the 
final declaration of independence and separation 
from Great Britain. Yet, in the English legisla- 
tive plan checks and balances prevail. That miti- 
gating feature did not exist in the Congress of 
the Confederation. The colonists were opposed 
to all kinds of unchecked and sovereign power, no 
matter where it was lodged ; whether in a many- 
headed commonwealth, in a confederation of states, 
or in a monarch. They reflected upon the fact, 
also, that, in 1648, the House of Commons had 
asserted its independence of the Upper House; 
determined to act as sitting in Parliament for their 
own behoof only, and as representing the commu- 
nity at large ; and resolved " that the Commons of 
England, assembled in Parliament, have the su- 
preme authority of the nation." The Commons 
thenceforth styled themselves, " The Parliament," 
and became the unrestrainable masters of the 
state.^ The two Houses of Parliament were at this 
epoch " invested with unlimited power, determin- 

1 Brodie's Constitutional History of the British Empire, vol. 3, 
PP- 319-320. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 9 1 

able only at their own pleasure ; and, in short, were, 
in their aggregate capacity, clothed with all the 
authority of absolute monarchy. Invested with all 
the legislative power, and entitled to appoint all 
public officers, they had a natural tendency to ad- 
vance their own greatness to the prejudice of the 
people, as well as to multiply jobs and places, that 
they might enrich and exalt themselves at the pub- 
lic expense Such was the natural tendency 

of this state of affairs ; and it is no answer to the 
objections, that the English Parliament at that time 
contained a number of patriots, who were prepared 
to make great personal sacrifices for the public 
* benefit, since an institution must not be appreci- 
ated by the integrity of particular men ; and this 
assembly, with all its virtue, had neither escaped 
the imputation of selfishness, nor the consequences 
of the system." ^ And so it became that these col- 
onists had been by experience and by the philos- 
ophy of histoiy educated to the principle not to 
trust their own affairs beyond their own immediate 
control. Federal and national legislative bodies, 
whether composed of two branches, each a check 
upon the undue acts of the other, or a single as- 
sembly unbalanced by a corresponding weight, 
were equally unacceptable to them. 

Then there was the unformed apparition of the 

1 Brodie's Constitutional History of the British Empire, vol. 3, 
p. 159. 



92 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

public debt affrighting a nation of insolvents with 
dreadful forebodings, and driving them into dis- 
honesty. A power to tax was, they likewise knew, 
a power to destroy. Their sources of wealth were 
many and abundant ; " in proportion to their num- 
ber, more opulent than the people of France ; " ^ 
but their industries and trade were disorganized. 
The war had been carried on by the States inde- 
pendently of each other in several respects ; the 
debts incurred in its course were incurred in part by 
the States, in part by the Congress. The States 
had become liable directly to creditors and retained 
the claims unliquidated against the Confederation 
for any balance which might appear on the final 
accounting. But how and when to pay that bal- 
ance, or any other claim, foreign or domestic, 
always excited nothing but contentious debate. 
On this subject two great parties were forming 
already in every State at the time when the con- 
vention to consider of a new form of government 
was proposed. They were distinctly marked ; pur- 
sued distinct objects, with systematic arrange- 
ment.^ 

Such were the temper and character of the peo- 
ple of America, at that eventful epoch, — the eve 
of the constitutional era. Any new form of gov- 
ernment for the whole of the States in unity had 

1 Bancroft's Hist. U. S., vol. lo, p. 173. 

2 Marshall's Lt/e of Waslmigtoti, vol. 2, p. 103. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 93 

to encounter and conciliate that temper and char- 
acter, and prejudices traditional and deep down in 
the heart. These, first, had to be removed, that the 
other might be established ; and this could be ac- 
complished only when the need of a new govern- 
ment began to be felt by the people. 

There was another and more comprehensive ne- 
cessity which any project for a new effective gov- 
ernment would have to insist upon. An amend- 
ment of the Articles of Confederation would not 
answer the public need. The vice was radical. 
A new system of government was the thing de- 
sired. It was a subject not to be mentioned just 
yet ; but other minds began to see what Hamilton 
saw in 1780 and of which he wrote to Duane. 
The idea would grow fruitfully if not forced. If 
able men could be brought together, in sessions 
not public, that object would, by candid, intelligent 
debate, develop itself into a conviction. A con- 
vention to consider of amendments to be proposed 
to the Articles of Confederation, might end, per- 
chance, in the proposal of a new Constitution and 
organization of government. This was to come 
in time. Those who were now congratulatino- 
each other in successful efforts to thwart Cono-ress 
m its measures, were unconsciously making inevi- 
table the chief thing they abhorred. To be sure 
the danger to liberty that lies in a supreme author- 
ity when it is placed in a single political body of 



94 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

men was an abstract principle not entirely discerni- 
ble by the people at large ; it did not enter into 
the prominent, active, and popular opposition to 
Congress. This danger, notwithstanding, was ever 
present to a few such men as Hamilton, and clearly 
indicated to them how futile and hazardous a mere 
amendment of the existing form of government 
would be. Though the refusals of the States were, 
at the time, lamented by good citizens friendly to 
an increase of the federal authority for its own 
national dignity and honest purpose, yet, before a 
long time had passed over their heads it was es- 
teemed fortunate, as Chancellor Kent has said, 
" that all the authority of a nation, in one compli- 
cated mass of jurisdiction, was not vested in a 
single body of men, and that Congress, as then 
constituted, was a most unfit and unsafe depository 
of political power." 

The attempts made before this one of 1787 to 
bring the colonies into a union for the national 
purposes of government had each failed of any 
permanent results. Let us consider the lessons 
taught by these several and independent attempts. 
They will teach us how much peoples and king- 
doms are indebted to adverse surrounding pressure 
for their prosperity and even national existence. 
Generally, by such immediate pressure of hostile as- 
sault or apprehended danger, requiring a defensive 
and offensive league for common protection, three 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 95 

leagues were, at distant periods, formed; and they 
went each to pieces when the danger was gone by. 
That of the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, 
Connecticut, and New Haven, in 1643, was en' 
tered into in view of attacks from contiguous In- 
dian tribes, and as a protection from encroach- 
ments from the Dutch colony. That league is 
known in history as the United Colonies of"" New 
England. The management of its common affairs 
was entrusted to commissioners, each colony hav- 
ing two ; but no executive power was conferred 
upon the commission. It was to consult and 
recommend merely. This combination is to be 
regarded as the very root of the series of like ef- 
forts towards a union which followed. It lasted, 
with a few amendments in its articles of compact,' 
for more than forty years. England looked with 
friendly disposition upon it, and it was dissolved 
only when, in 1686, the old charters of the New 
England colonies were superseded by the com- 
mission of James II. Congresses of Governors 
and Commissioners on behalf of other colonies as 
well as on behalf of those of New England, met, 
after that dissolution, to provide means to guard 
the frontiers of their interior boundaries. One of 
these Congresses met at Albany, in the Province 
of New York, in 1722 ; but another, which was of 
great importance in its consequences, and in its 
influence upon the minds of thoughtful men, was 



96 ^ ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

held there in 1754. The object of the assembly 
was a bold, comprehensive, and well defined project 
for a continental union. Its urgent occasion was 
to defend those American colonists in the war 
with France which at that moment was at hand. 
Its project for a union was, nevertheless, rejected. 
The sagacious Benjamin Franklin was one of the 
members who were the authors of that proposed 
form for a union ; and many of the most eminent 
inhabitants of the colonies assisted in the delibera- 
tions. Thoughts were there liberated and freely 
discussed which led to ideas that prepared the way 
for the future. While those discussions manifested 
a lively jealousy of the power and blandishments 
of royal associations, the general feeling was more 
conspicuously marked by a filial respect for Eng- 
lish principles of government. These colonists, in- 
deed, were emulating each other in duteous obei- 
sance to their mother country. But a strong tide of 
local policy, ambition, and rival colonial interests 
submerged those and all other considerations, and 
became more intense than before. Franklin said, 
in 1750, that loyal sentiments were so thoroughly 
in the hearts of the people that a union against 
England was absolutely impossible ; or, at least, 
without being forced by the most grievous tyranny 
and oppression. This feeling, though impaired, 
did not die out even during the Revolution, but 
lingered until the measures of the Shelburne ad- 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 97 

ministration, succeeding the Peace at Paris of 
1783, quenched it out for a long season. So failed 
the original attempt at a " Continental " Congress. 
The ideas, however, brought away from that con- 
sultation were beginning the work of the ultimate 
independence of America; and the one thino- 
which Franklin imagined might possibly force the 
colonies into such a union was now developing. 
This thing was the claim of the British Parliament 
to tax America without representation. The om- 
nipotence of Parliament was displayed. The right 
to tax was boastingly and offensively proclaimed. 
The attempt to enforce it by military aid aroused 
the colonists. Then a Congress of delegates came 
from nine of the colonies and, in October, 1765, 
met together in New York. A bill of rights was 
set forth in which the exclusive power of taxation 
was resolved to abide in their own several leo-isla- 
tures. Thus the road was aclearing for that more 
general and extensive association of the colonies 
which followed in September, 1774. This was 
the assembly since known as the first " Congress." 
Temperate and intelligent in all its proceedings, 
it commanded the attention and admiration of the 
enlightened world. Its conciliatory tone toward 
the English government and its intelligible char- 
actered position, claiming and demanding for the 
colonists the rights and liberties of English free- 
men, were most prominent and observed. It was 
7 



C^ 



98 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

hard to break the tie which held their hearts rather 
than their political allegiance. They ever spoke 
in the spirit of the British Constitution. Their 
declaratory resolutions asserted the inalienable im- 
munities common as a birthright to all natural 
subjects of the crown ; they specified the plan of 
violent measures which was preparing against 
those immunities, and they bound their constitu- 
ents by the most sacred bonds of honor and of 
country to renounce commerce with Great Britain ; 
that being, in their judgment, the better means 
whereby to secure the blessings of the former, and 
to arrest the assaults of the other. It was in this 
step that the epoch of the Revolution began ; and 
thus commenced the foundation for the conti- 
nental union of the colonies. The epithet came 
into popular use by this time that people were 
thinking " continentally." Again, in May, 1775, 
another Congress, in like mood and with similar 
purpose, met at Philadelphia. Invested with am- 
ple discretionary powers, it unmistakably indicated 
the courage and fixed purpose which prevailed. 
In truth, the war for independence had begun. 
WashinQ:ton was at the head of the Continental 
army. He was soon to be proclaimed Dictator. 
The history of the war itself has slight bearing on 
our special theme. 

It was not until December 15, 1777, that Con- 
gress could reconcile and unite the wary and de- 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 99 

centralizing tendencies of the thirteen political 
communities into the agreement which is ex- 
pressed by the Articles of Confederation. Those 
articles were submitted to the legislatures of the 
several communities ; declared to be the result of 
present and overwhelming necessity ; of a wish for 
reconciliation ; and that they were concurred in as 
the best that could be attained ; and not for any 
intrinsic excellence. The States came slowly in. 
One State, but only on condition, rejected the 
plan. The retentive power of local interests and 
local ambition did not freely provide even when 
the sea of trouble was rising near and strong. 

The government of the Confederation began; 
that of the Revolution was superseded. The 
" discretionary powers " had been often used by it ; 
but under the new Confederation those powers were 
rapidly abridged, and Congress lessened into an 
inefficient council of advice, generally unheeded 
and ever powerless. A sense of incapacity be- 
came habitual, for Congress was mastered and nul- 
lified by the States ; sometimes by a single State. 
A repudiated public debt, the continued presence 
of the armed foe after the terms of peace had been 
concluded, hostile measures directly affecting in- 
juriously the industries and trade of the States : 
these adversities were to be the indirect forces by 
which " a solid republican government " was to be 
expressed. The efficacious pressure, as from the 



lOO ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

first, in 1643, it had been, came once more from 
unfriendly foreign sources, and so induced a suc- 
cessful proposal for a union to proceed now from 
some States to Congress and again unsuccessfully 
from it to the States. The future Republic was 
truly sown in weakness, to be raised in power. 

To Alexander Hamilton history traces that par- 
ent thoucrht which made the institution of " a solid 
republican government," for national objects, possi- 
ble. It was not a repairing and strengthening and 
expansion of the Confederation. A new system of 
government was to be set up and to be declared 
as established " forever." The expedient had never 
before been tried or heard of, so far as historians 
to the present time have been able to discover. It 
is said by publicists, that the history of the phi- 
losophy of politics from Aristotle down, shows 
no precedent or practical suggestion for the con- 
trivance. All preceding associations of republics, 
or of democratic States, were simply leagues. The 
quality peculiar to the idea that a duality of gov- 
ernments was adaptable to the States independ- 
ently, and, also to a consolidated union of them, 
must be accepted as the invention of Hamilton's 
creative mind. 

This idea was to bring about an era in the 
science of statehousehold applicable to a republi- 
can form of government. We prefer to use, in the 
like sense to which we are accustomed to the term 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. lOI 

political economy, that other composite word, itself 
of German descent, " state household : " an imao^e 
clearly bodying forth the source, the direction, and 
proper objects of municipal communities and of 
nations. The phrase acknowledges the " State " 
to be naturally an extension and amplification of 
the domestic household, and that all legitimate 
and natural government springs from its primal 
fountain, the family. It rises from families to 
communities, from villages to nations. As the 
members of a family have their relative duties to 
the family, so has each member, as a citizen, rela- 
tive duties to the state to which he owes a nat- 
ural or a local allegiance. In the first condition 
they constitute in their natural domestic group 
the family ; in the latter they constitute the state. 
The family was in order of time before the state, 
and the state is a combination of fathers and mas- 
ters for the better protection of themselves and 
families. Reason points to this as the probable 
origin of political communities, and history attests 
the fact of such origin. Like as the members of 
the family regard its chief and husband, domus 
vinctdum} so does the individual citizen in his 

^ Although this etymology of the title husband may be specious, 
yet it presents to the understanding a most suggestive and beauti- 
ful image ; and as it has the authority of Spelman, and Francis 
Junius acknowledges it " sufHciently specious," the writer thinks 
he is free to use the epithet in that sense. 

The name of Francis Junius suggests one other Francis and 



I02 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

public capacity look to the state, though himself 
an essential constituent of it, as a supreme law 

"Junius." This is, we confess, aside from the direct way we are 
going ; but let us loiter a moment and take a glimpse into the at- 
tractive by-path. Perhaps it is one not more curious, and even 
less fanciful, than some which have engaged the searching skill of 
intelligent minds in the same pursuit of discovering clews which 
might lead to the detection of the famous writer, obscured in 
the shade of another's name. Stat notnmis umbra. Lucan's mean- 
ing — from which poet the celebrated motto was taken — is: "he 
(Pompey) stands the shadow of a (great) name." Did Sir Philip 
Francis (assuming him to be accepted now generally as the author 
of " The Letters ") venture so far as to hazard his detection by thus 
indicating that he, " Junius," was the son of Francis ? Though the 
eminent critic's book was not popularly known in England, yet the 
very title to the most valued of the works of Francis Junius reads, 
'■'• Ft-anciscii yimii; Frandsci Filii j Etytnologlcon AngHca?t7tm." 
Is it a mere coincidence, or was the daring author with all his 
prudent circumspection, tempted, by the allurement of the device, 
toward the confines of exposure ? Francis Junius was a man of 
vast classical erudition, and a great traveller, a friend of Grotius, 
Salmasius, Vossius (his brother-in-law), and Archbishop Usher. 
He was born at Heidelberg about 1589: in 1630 he went to Eng- 
land ; died in his 85th or 86th year (1678) at Windsor, and was 
buried there. The University of Oxford, to which he bequeathed 
his manuscripts and books, out of gratitude, caused a Latin inscrip- 
tion to be placed over his tomb {Preface to Phillimore's translation 
of Lessing's Laocooti). The works of Junius were highly estimated 
by philologists in the times of George IL and of George IIL, and 
his volume on the Art of Painting amo7ig the Ancients, made him 
known to those who specially cultivated a taste for ancient litera- 
ture. Such a scholar was the father of Sir Philip Francis. It is 
no strain upon belief to infer that Philip Francis, senior, the trans- 
lator of " Horace," " Demosthenes," and " Eschines," author of 
the tragedies of the Eugenia and of Constantine, and of several 
political pamphlets, was quite familiar with these writings of Fran- 
cis Junius ; and that his brilliantly gifted son was nurtured in an 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 103 

and civil governance. Herein we have, not only 
the special and local government within a family 
and limited to own affairs, but we have a gen- 
eral government comprehending and pervading 
throughout, all at once, the grand aggregate, su- 
preme in its unity and in its universality ; each a 
government bearing directly upon the individual. 
Herein arises the feasible and practicable system 
for a duality of government over the same territory 
and over the same people. In it we can see the 
first original of the principle which Hamilton had 
divined and which he was to apply to the several 
States in their independent operation and scope, 
and to the same States in Empire. He saw the 
consequent while it was yet dormant in principle, 
and he called it into existence and organization. 
Governmental institutions are not made ; they are 
a growth, and derive their nurture, character, and 
strength from the ground which bears them.^ 

intellectual atmosphere filled with refined learning, esthetic exer- 
cises, and spirited poHtical dialectics. When that son, in the course 
of his political career, desired to shroud himself in a cloud of im- 
personal authorship, it would be natural for him to seek it in the 
shadow of a name great to him and associated with the cherished 
remembrance of his paternal home. All of this is digression, how- 
ever ; but not farther away than one on another circumstance of the 
same enticing topic to be found in a note to pages 87, 88, in the 
fourth volume of Macaulay's History of Englajid. 

1 God, "who created man, created in him, and with him, the 
rudiments of that government which is necessary for the simplest 
form of society. In the extension and enlargement of society, men 
are thrown more upon their own resources for the expedients of 



I04 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

This idea of Hamilton first appears in a letter 
written by him to James Duane, an eminent mem- 
ber from New York, in the Continental Congress. 
It is dated September 3, 1780. The expedient 
was matured, and the letter was written, by Ham- 
ilton amid the stir of active war and " in the tented 
field." It contained, also, what is generally con- 
ceded to be, the very first project uttered in Amer- 
ica to found a national government by " a solid 
coercive union." Hamilton was then twenty-three 
years old. The previous year, likewise in camp, 
while the army was in winter quarters, he had con- 
ceived and perfected a mode by which public credit 
might be restored, and a change in the whole ad- 
ministration of public affairs effected. This he 
anonymously sent to Robert Morris, the financier 
of the government. These letters are notable, for 
in them we get at the principia of Hamilton's 
scheme for a republican form of a general govern- 
ment and of his process of finance ; each of which 
was destined to prevail and, for weal or woe, to 

government ; and in respect to these, God no otherwise ordains 
than as His overruling Providence directs. Families and tribes 
combine themselves into one nation under a single head, or they 
vest the supreme power in the hands of the few or the many ; and 
hence the monarch, hereditary or elective, the oligarchy, the de- 
mocracy, etc., all which are the effects of human contrivance. But 
government, in its original or elementary form (which is patri- 
archal), is the more immediate operation of the Divine wisdom, 
and is stamped on Nature by the Divine decree." — Samuel Sea- 
bury, D. D., on the General Divisions of Society, p. 74. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 05 

control American affairs in the near and, again by 
revival, in the distant future. — To be stigmatized, 
when Jefferson was in the ascendant, as inimical 
to the existence of the government ; to be over- 
borne in its chief feature, a national bank, by the 
executive daring of Jackson ; and to revive in each 
phase, with domineering spirit, and with full am- 
plitude of sway, under the administration of Lin- 
coln. " A virtue cannot really die. It may 
indeed be neglected, forgotten, depreciated, de- 
nounced ; but it cannot be absolutely extinguished 
by the verdict whether of a school of thought, or 
of a country, or of an age, or of an entire civiliza- 
tion. If, indeed, it be a virtue at all ; if it ever de- 
served the name ; if it was ever more than a 
strictly relative form of excellence ; then, assuredly, 
it is an imperishable force." ^ 

It is likewise notable that whether this youth 
sent forth his thoughts on these grand themes 
with his proper name or anonymously, they re- 
ceived ready attention from the ablest and most 
experienced statesmen of that time. The maturity 
and perfection of the very mechanism of these 
projects, which distinguish them from the day- 
dreams of speculative philosophy, appear incred- 
ible as the product of one so young. But, be 
it remembered, he was already known as Wash- 
ington's " principal and most confidential aid." 

^ Canon Liddon's Sermon on " The Law of Progress." 



Io6 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

Hamilton, in that letter to Duane, enlarges upon 
the defects in the Confederation of the States and 
suggests the practical remedies. The fundamen- 
tal, thorough imperfection, and the absence of in- 
herent vitality, we have seen. The remedies which 
he proposed were two : That the Congress of the 
Confederation should resume and exercise " the 
discretionary powers " which he believed to have 
been originally vested in it for the safety of the 
state. The other ; that Congress call immediately 
a Convention of all the States, with full authority 
to conclude finally upon a General Confederation, 
carefully stating beforehand, explicitly, the evils 
arising from a want of power in Congress, and the 
impossibility of supporting the contest as things 
are; and this to the end that the delegates may 
come, possessed of proper sentiments, as well as 
proper authority, to give efhcacy to the meeting; 
that their commission should include a right of 
vesting Congress with the w^hole, or a proportion, 
of the unoccupied lands to be used as a means of 
raising a revenue; but allowing the political juris- 
diction over those lands to remain in the States. 
He confessed that the first remedy would be 
thought by Congress too bold. The habit into 
which Congress had fallen impressed too deeply 
into it a sense of its want of power. From disuse 
the existence of the power itself came to be denied. 

Hamilton had always been of the opinion that 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 107 

the National Government was of undefined pow- 
ers ; that such " are discretionary powers, limited 
only by the object for which they were given : in 
the present case the independence and freedom of 
America ; " that " the sovereignty and independ- 
ence of the people began in a federal act : — The 
Declaration of Independence was the fundamental 
Constitution of every State ; " and that " the Union 
originally had a complete sovereignty" and "its 
constitutional powers not controllable by any 
State." Therefore, his first suggestion was that 
Congress should resume and exercise, without fur- 
ther concessions from the States, these " discre- 
tionary powers." ^ 

1 " In the interpretation of laws it is admitted to be a good rule 
to resort to the co- existing circumstances, and collect from thence 
the intention of the framers of the law. Let us apply this rule to 
the present case. In the commencement of the Revolution dele- 
gates were sent to meet in Congress with large discretionary pow- 
ers. In short, generally speaking, with full power ' to take care of 
the republic' In the whole of this transaction the idea of a union 
of the colonies was carefully held up. It pervaded all our public 
acts. In the Declaration of Independence we find it continued and 
confirmed A government may exist without any formal or- 
ganization or precise definition of its powers. However improper 
it might have been, that the Federal Government should have con- 
tinued to exist with such absolute and undefined authority, this 
does not militate against the position that it did possess such au- 
thority. It only proves the propriety of a more regular formation 
to ascertain its limits. This was the object of the present Confed- 
eration, which is, in fact, an abridgment of the original sover- 
eignty of Union." — Hamilton's Works, vol. 2, p. 353. 



I08 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

The scheme of government, and the scope of its 
necessary and convenient authority, as therein 
pointed out, had the maturing approval of his 
judgment during hfe, and, as we shall see, were 
ever the controlling merits of all measures for 
which he afterwards contended. " Civil power," he 
reiterated, " properly organized and exerted, is ca- 
pable of diffusing its force to a very great extent, 
and can, in a manner, reproduce itself in every 
part of a great empire, by a judicious arrangement 
of subordinate institutions." The political history 
of the government of the United States, " in em- 
pire," during and, especially, subsequently to the 
war for the union, make clear and manifest the in- 
exorable logic of this proposition. 

The letter to Duane brought once more, but by 
a well defined, intelligible scheme, a project for a 
more perfect union before many men in authority. 
Conventions had been called and held. Nothing, 
as usual, could be effected by them. In January, 
1780, one was convened at Philadelphia in the 
hope that power would be delegated to Congress 
to lay and collect if only a revenue. The New 
England States, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Dela- 
ware, and Maryland were represented ; but not 
New York. Its governor, George Clinton, did not 
approve of it. The convention adjourned to Feb- 
ruary to await New York to meet other States ; 
then further adjourned to April, when another 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 109 

call was made for a meeting in August ; and then 
in August, the only States that appeared were 
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. 
The subject was ceasing to be interesting. The 
supplications of Washington and of Congress 
were falling on heedless and hostile dispositions. 
But, notwithstanding the discouragements, wise 
and instructive resolutions and addresses were is- 
sued from these conventions. Those words were, 
indeed, things. The education of the people, by 
several means, was going on. Hamilton, abating 
no jot of hope and heart, caught at all these symp- 
toms of a tendency towards effective union and 
adequate government ; helped to warm them into 
life-giving influence, and to spread them over the 
land. His pen was constantly busy, and during 
1781-82 he published "The Continentalist," in 
which he discussed, in his usual clear, full, and 
deliberative style, the state of public concerns and 
the remedies. On Tuesday, July 21, 1783, the 
legislature of the State of New York passed a res- 
olution for a General Convention of the States. 
It had been drafted by Hamilton.^ He, with four 
of the most eminent citizens of that State, were 
appointed, in pursuance thereof, delegates to rep- 
resent the State in the United States Congress 
for the ensuing year. But nothing practical came 
of it. Listlessness was settling down upon the 

^ Hamilton's Works, vol. 2, p. 203. 



no ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

hopes and fears of the people. With the dawn of 
peace they sank to be more and more dormant. 
The anxious solicitude, reasonably elicited by the 
condition of public interests, went little beyond the 
leading statesmen, and those more intelligent citi- 
zens sensitive to national honor. 

January i, 1783, Congress again issued an ad- 
dress to the States. It most earnestly set forth 
the facts and the urgent need of action. The 
facts and need were admitted to be as stated. 
But, argued those in opposition, good reasons 
must give place to better reasons ; the individual 
interest of a State is to be esteemed of primal and 
higher obligation. Citizens were, as w^e already 
mentioned, taking sides on the question, and the 
two parties began to gather and to take form. 
One body attached itself, as first in order of duties, 
to the State government, viewed all the functions 
of Congress with fear, and assented reluctantly to 
any measure which would enable that " head to 
act, in any respect, independently of its members." 
With a morbid candor they declared the real 
truth. The members, in a reversed order of 
nature, controlled and directed the head. The 
other party fondly contemplated America as a 
nation ; labored without ceasing to empower it 
with a national authority and force ; felt the value 
of national honor and of national faith ; and were 
persuaded that both were jeopardized, if the secur- 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. Ill 

ity and payment of the national debts, incurred in 
the war and for the independence of the nation, 
were now to be left, at the advent of jDeace, to the 
concurrence of the thirteen disjected States. The 
officers of the army, who by associating with each 
other, away from local influences, and whose ex- 
perience had given them bitter proofs not soon to 
be forgotten, sympathized with the national party. 
The states party was more numerous and pow- 
erful. The connections between a State and its 
own immediate citizens are ever more intimate 
and tangible than any possible with a general gov- 
ernment. It is only and simply by a mental op- 
eration that the mind can get near to an apprecia- 
tion of such a general sort of government, existing 
only in contemplation and as a maxim. It was 
neither seen nor felt. It was not capable of acting 
upon the inhabitants of a community, and not 
coming, like the state, in daily contact with them. 
It was while this Congress of 1783 was endeav- 
oring to reach some practicable conclusion that 
peace was made at Paris. Sensible that the char- 
acter of the government may be fixed definitely by 
the measures which should directly follow the 
treaty of peace, citizens of the very first political 
talents and high social reputation sought places in 
this Congress. With unwearied perseverance, and 
despite of all former failures and the absence of 
encouragement, they digested what they concluded 



112 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

to be a feasible project, which obtained the ap- 
proval of Congress. The main object in its view 
was, of course, the, now more than ever, imme- 
diate and overwhelming one, " to restore and sup- 
port public credit ; " and, that this might be ac- 
complished, it was essential " to obtain from the 
States substantial funds for funding the whole debt 
of the United States." Hamilton attended this 
Congress. He had reached only the 26th year of 
his age. His services while there were many and 
important. He was planting and disseminating 
doctrines of a utilitarian polity. After several 
weeks of anxious and protracted consideration a 
project was matured. James Madison, afterwards 
fourth President of " The United States of Amer- 
ica," Alexander Hamilton and Oliver Ellsworth, 
afterwards Chief Justice, were appointed a com- 
mittee to prepare the address, which should ac- 
company the recommendation to the several States. 
Hamilton was the author of this address. It re- 
cited the defects of the government ; described and 
explained the project to meet the public debt; 
called upon the justice and plighted faith of the 
States to give it proper support, and to weigh the 
consequences of rejection. The merits of the 
creditors' demands were again asseverated ; and 
the report ends by asking that it be remem- 
bered, " that it ever has been the pride and boast 
of America, that the rights for which she con- 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. II3 

tended were the rights of human nature. No 
instance has heretofore occurred, nor can any in- 
stance be expected hereafter to occur, in which 
the unadulterated forms of republican govern- 
ment can pretend to so fair an opportunity of jus- 
tifying themselves by their fruits. In this view, 
the citizens of the United States are responsible 
for the greatest trust ever confided to a political 
society. If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude, 
and all the other good qualities which ennoble 
the character of a nation, and fulfill the ends 
of government be the fruits of our establishments, 
the cause of liberty will acquire a dignity and lus- 
tre which it has never yet enjoyed ; and an exam- 
ple will be set, which cannot but have the most 
favorable influence on the rights of mankind." 

The toil of Washington, as the commander-in- 
chief of the army, was ended. Necessity drew the 
sword — victory sheathed it. He was on the eve 
of resigning that trust. The new effort by Con- 
gress had his deepest sympathy, and, as a parting 
advice forced from him by the critical condition 
of the country, he wrote a letter, and, on June 8th, 
1783, sent a copy to the governor of each State. 
It was replete with tender feeling, and instinct 
with sentiments of honor and patriotism, urging 
that this recommendation from Congress be 
adopted. An impression was made ; but momen- 
tary. It fell again on the rock, and took no root. 

8 



114 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

Indifference, worse than active hostility, chilled the 
ardor of the cause. The decline of national worth 
had begun. The best men of America were of 
this Congress. Their work was despised, rejected; 
nevertheless, Congress did not give up, nor 
weary. 

In February, 1786, the revenue plan of April 
1 8th, 1783, was again brought forward. As that 
part of it concerning internal taxes was hopeless, 
the States, therefore, were requested to enable Con- 
gress, " to carry into effect that part which re- 
lated to impost, so soon as it should be acceded to." 
There was reason to believe that the impost might 
be secured. In the course of the year all the 
States, except New York, had granted as requested 
the impost duty. That State, certainly, had passed 
an act upon the subject, but that act did not give 
Congress the power to collect the money. It re- 
quired that the collections should be made by 
agents of the State, amenable to the State alone. 
This non-conformity on the part of a single State 
to accede to the proposition suspended its opera- 
tion. Governor Clinton declined to facilitate a 
reconsideration by the legislature. Thus finally 
was defeated the labored, persistent efforts of 
Congress to relieve and save the country's credit, 
its unity and honor. 

The traditional dread of centralized national 
government ; the traditional confidence in their 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE, I15 

own independent statehouseholds ; the policy of 
decentralization — were triumphant over all. The 
Republic was lost awhile. For a season, the Rev- 
olution seemed to be worse than in vain. But 
while the Western horizon was filled with the 
clouds and darkness of descending hope, on the 
opposite quarter of the heavens arose other beams 
that were struggling, in the cool of early dawn, to 
usher in the light of a new and perfect day. 

This last defeat was decisive and set adrift all 
that concerned the general weal of the country. 
Anarchy was apparent. It was felt profoundly 
and humiliatingly by those who desired to stay that 
downward course which was bearing vital public 
interests to utter annihilation. They wished to 
place the country as fairly as possible before the 
world. La Fayette was visiting the courts of 
northern Europe. He, writing to Washington, 
especially of what had occurred at the Court of 
Frederic the Great, said : " I wish the other senti- 
ments I have had occasion to discover with respect 
to America, were equally satisfactory with those 
that are personal to yourself ; .... by their con- 
duct in the revolution the citizens of America 
have commanded the respect of the world ; but it 
grieves me to think they will in a measure lose it, 
unless they strengthen the confederation ; give 
Congress power to regulate their trade, pay off 
their debt, or at least the interest of it ; establish 



Il6 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

a well regulated militia ; and, in a word, complete 
all those measures which you have recommended 
to them."^ John Adams, then our Minister to 
the Court of St. James, wrote from London, to 
his relative, Dr. Tufts, these words : — 

" As to politics, all that can be said is summarily- 
comprehended in a few words. Our country is 
grown, or at least has been, dishonest. She has 
broke her faith with nations, and with her own 
citizens ; and parties are all about for continuing 
this dishonorable course. She must become 
strictly honest and punctual to all the world be- 
fore she can recover the confidence of anybody at 
home or abroad. The duty of all good men is to 
join in making this doctrine popular, and in dis- 
countenancing every attempt against it. This 
censure is too harsh, I suppose, for common ears, 
but the essence of these sentiments must be 
adopted throughout America before we can pros- 
per." 2 

America had impaired its respect in Europe; 
and those there, most friendly to her welfare, were 
ceasing, at last, to find excuses for her defaults. 
Washington retired, and seeking a much needed 
rest amid the shades of Mount Vernon, could not 
suppress an expression of his own mortification. 
He wrote : " The war has terminated most advan- 

' Marshall's Life of Washington, vol. 2, p. 97. 
^ Life of John Adams, vol. 2, p. 125. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. I17 

tageously for America, and a fair field is presented 
to our view ; but I confess to you, my dear sir, 
that I do not think we possess wisdom or justice 
enough to cultivate it properly. Illiberality, jeal- 
ousy, and local policy, mix too much in our public 
councils, for the good government of the union. 
In a word, the confederation appears to me to be 
little more than a shadovv' without the substance ; 
and Congress a nugatory body, their ordinances 
being little attended to. To me, it is a solecism in 
politics, — indeed it is one of the most extraordi- 
nary things in nature, that we should confederate 
as a nation, and yet be afraid to give the rulers of 
that nation, who are the creatures of our own mak- 
ing, appointed for a limited and short duration, 
and who are amenable for every action, recallable 
at any moment, and subject to all the evils which 
they may be instrumental in producing, — suffi- 
cient powers to order and direct the affairs of the 
same. By such policy as this, the wheels of gov- 
ernment are clogged, and our brightest prospects, 
and that high expectation which was entertained 
by the wondering world, are turned into astonish- 
ment; and from the high ground on which we 
stood, we are descending into the vale of confusion 
and darkness. That we have it in our power to 
become one of the most respectable nations upon 
earth, admits, in my humble opinion, of no doubt, 
if we would but pursue a wise, just, and liberal 



Ii8 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

policy towards one another, and would keep good 
faith with the rest of the world ; that our resources 
are ample and increasing, none can deny ; but 
while they are grudgingly applied, or not applied 
at all, we give a vital stab to public faith, and will 
sink in the eyes of Europe, into contempt." 

The downward course still continued. But an 
unseen influence of correcting power began to in- 
dicate its action upon the surface of events. Some- 
thing was at work which was to direct those events 
toward the great and fundamental change in the 
political system. That local selfishness, which 
neither the counsels nor supplications of assembled 
intelligence, patriotism, and virtue, the character 
of Washington, the sympathy of his valedictory, 
nor even the voice of honor itself could provoke 
to duty, was quickening into alarm. This redeem- 
ing genius came under the appearance of endan- 
gered Trade. English creditors had debts yet due 
them in the several States ; English troops yet 
stayed in possession of military posts within the 
United States; and — which produced more ex- 
tensive disquiet to the States than any other 
cause — Great Britain was acting upon a rigorous 
commercial scheme invigorated by positive legis- 
lation. The latter was pressing most heavily and 
disastrously upon the characteristic restless enter- 
prise and industry of the people. A retaliatory 
policy, compelling Great Britain to relax this rigor 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. II9 

by meeting it with commercial and navigation 
regulations equally restrictive, was suggested. 
Congress, however, could not act any further with 
effect upon foreign nations by again assuming 
with them, that the States were in effect a unit. 
The fiction had been dissipated. Its want of au- 
thority had become known. But the weakness of 
Congress was, at length, becoming the strength of 
the union cause. It had no power to regulate 
commerce either as to foreign powers or as be- 
tween the States. The jealousies of the States 
had not permitted them to agree upon a method 
capable, now in the moment of utmost need, of 
enacting such a retaliatory policy. As with all 
former combinations and leagues between the 
colonies and States, the pressure for adherence 
encompassed them from exterior circumstances. 
The interests of Trade triumphed over State Sov- 
ereignty. Converts from the mart multiplied to 
the conviction that a national central power was 
a necessity for the regulation of commerce. 

Meanwhile the United States representatives in 
Europe were endeavoring to negotiate commer- 
cial treaties. Commissioners had been appointed 
to that end. The trade with Great Britain and 
its West Indian colonies had a peculiar value. 
Troubles had followed the treaty of peace and 
serious consequences threatened. Mr. Adams 
had been transferred from the mission to Holland, 



I20 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

and appeared at the Court of St. James, as Min- 
ister. He was failing to form a commercial con- 
vention there. Indeed, he ultimately failed in 
accomplishing any one of the great matters under- 
taken there ; and, at his own request, he was re- 
called in 1788.-^ England had declined for the 
very reason that the Confederate Assembly of 
the " United States " had no power to secure the 
observance of a treaty. There could be no reci- 
procity of obligation. The ideal of nationality, 
upon which the peace had been predicated at 
Paris, was no longer admissible, after the cross 
purposes between the States and Congress had 
become so notorious. " We are one nation to-day, 
and thirteen to-morrow," Washington frankly con- 
fessed. " Who will treat with us on such terms ? " 
Official information came that England would 
make no commercial concessions to the United 
States in their dismembered, dissociate, and con- 
tentious condition. The States were not a nation ; 
and, therefore, not capable of assuming the respon- 
sibilities of nationality. Mr. Adams, in accord with 
the duties of his official position, presented a me- 
morial to the British Minister for foreign affairs. 
It asked and urged a complete compliance on the 
part of Great Britain with the treaty of peace. The 
Marquis of Carmarthen acknowledged, explicitly 
enough, the obligations, created by that treaty, to 

^ Life of John Adams, vol. 2, p. 125. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 121 

withdraw the garrisons from all posts within the 
territory of the United States ; but he insisted, that 
the obligation of the United States to remove 
every lawful impediment to the recovery of debts 
due by its citizens to English subjects was one 
of equivalent obligation : as correspondent and as 
clear ; and he added the assurance, " that, when- 
ever America should manifest a real determina- 
tion to fulfill her part of the treaty, Great Britain 
would not hesitate to prove her sincerity to coop- 
erate in whatever points depended upon her, for 
carrying every article of it into real and complete 
effect." The King, also, when the American Min- 
ister was taking his leave in 1 788, said to him : 
*' Mr. Adams, you may with great truth assure the 
United States that whenever they shall fulfill the 
treaty on their part, I, on my part, will fulfill it in 
all its particulars." The imputation was felt to be 
humiliating and true. Not willing to leave the 
matter there, the ministry seem to have had a 
disposition, with motives for certain future advan- 
tages, likely to arise from a continuance of the 
want of a common supreme government over the 
States,^ to increase the pain natural to minds sen- 

^ Benjamin Franklin writes from Passy, February 8, 1785, to 
John Jay : " I did hope to have heard by the last packet of your 
having accepted the secretaryship of foreign affairs, but was dis- 
appointed. I write to you now, therefore, only as a private friend ; 
yet I may mention respecting public affairs, that, as far as I can 
perceive, the good disposition of this court towards us continues. 



122 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

sitive to the claims of honor, and so the ministry 
affected a temper which was readily construed 
into an intentional affront. Mr. Adams said he 
met only " with that dry decency and cold civility 
which appears to have been the premeditated 
plan from the beginning." But, notwithstanding, 
Americans were not influenced by such indiscreet 
conduct into any sort of palliation or excuse for 
the short-comings of their own countrymen. They 
themselves saw, felt, and acknowledged the truth 
as it appeared at the time. We say, as it appeared 
at that time, for it was subsequently discovered that 
England herself was already in serious default, and, 
so much so, that, if it had become known, she was 
not at liberty to insist on the position which she 
took in relation to any non-fulfillment on the part 
of America of the articles of the treaty. When the 
first diplomatic plenipotentiary from Great Britain 
came to the United States, Mr. Jefferson, then the 
Secretary for Foreign Affairs,^ made that gentle- 
man acquainted with the mistaken ground which 

I wish I could say as much for the rest of the European courts. 
I think that their desire of being connected with us by treaties, is 
of late much abated ; and this I suppose is occasioned by the 
pains Britain takes to represent us everywhere as distracted with 
divisions, discontent with our governments, the people unwilling 
to pay taxes, the Congress unable to collect them, and many desir- 
ing the restoT'ation of the old government. The English papers are 
full of this stuff, and their ministers get it copied into the foreign 
papers." 

^ The office since called the Secretary of State. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 123 

his government had taken on this particular sub- 
ject, and seems to have convinced him that this 
was the true state of the case.^ We, however, are 

1 The famous state-paper of May 29, 1790, written by Jefferson, 
then the Secretary for Foreign Affairs under the Washington ad- 
ministration, clearly proved, and was tacitly admitted by Mr. Ham- 
mond, the first British Minister to the United States, as the newly 
discovered truth of the case, that "the treaty of 1783 was violated 
in England before it was known in America, and in America as 
soon as known, and that too in points so essential as, that without 
them, it never would have been concluded ; " and that " the recov- 
ery of the debts was obstructed validly in none of the States, indi- 
rectly only in a few, and that not till after the infractions committed 
on the other side." 

Perhaps it is well for us to remember, in apology for the popular 
dissatisfaction, that there were other views widely held, and at least 
with plausible argument in their support, discouraging the payment 
of such debts ; and though they did not prevail even with his asso- 
ciates, yet Franklin, who was in most friendly relations with Shel- 
burne, thought proper to propose and read the following to the 
Commissioners before signing the preliminary articles : — 

" It is agreed, that his Britannic Majesty will earnestly recom- 
mend it to his Parliament to provide for and make a compensation 
to the merchants and shop-keepers of Boston, whose goods and 
merchandise were seized and taken out of their stores, warehouses, 
and shops, by order of General Gage and others of his command- 
ers and officers there ; and also to the inhabitants of Philadelphia, 
for the goods taken away by his army there ; and to make compen- 
sation, also, for the tobacco, rice, indigo, and negroes, etc., seized 
and carried off by his armies under General Arnold, Cornwallis, 
and others, from the States of Virginia, North and South Carolina, 
and Georgia ; and also for all vessels and cargoes, belonging to 
the inhabitants of the said United States, which were estopped, 
seized, or taken, either in the ports, or on the seas, by his govern- 
ment, or by his ships of war, before the declaration of war against 
the said States. And it is further agreed that his Britannic Maj- 
esty will also earnestly recommend it to his Parliament to make 



124 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

not strictly considering the historical truth con- 
cerning the particulars of those transactions, but 
the effect of England's adverse course, and the 
effect of other circumstances, both interstate and 
foreign, whether real or supposed at the time to 
be real, which had a bearing in accelerating those 

compensation for all the towns, villages, and farms burnt and de- 
stroyed by his troops, or adherents, in the said United States. 

" Facts. — There existed a free commerce, upon mutual faith, 
between Great Britain and America. The merchants of the former 
credited the merchants and planters of the latter with great quan- 
tities of goods, on the common expectation that the merchants, hav- 
ing sold the goods, would make the accustomed remittance ; that 
the planters would do the same by the labor of their negroes, and 
the produce of that labor, tobacco, rice, indigo, etc. 

" England, before the goods were sold in America, sends an armed 
force, seizes those goods in the stores ; some even in the ships 
that brought them, and carries them off ; seizes, also, and carries 
off the tobacco, rice, and indigo, provided by the planters to make 
returns, and even the negroes, from whose labor they might hope 
to raise other produce for that purpose. 

" Britain now demands that the debts shall nevertheless be paid. 
Will she, can she, justi}', refuse making compensation for such 
seizures ? 

" If a draper, who had sold a piece of linen to a neighbor on 
credit, should follow him, and take the linen from him by force, 
and then send a bailiff to arrest him for debt, would any court of 
law or equity award the payment of the debt, without ordering a 
restitution of the cloth ? 

" Will not the debtors in America cry out, that, if this compensa- 
tion be not made, they were betrayed by a pretended credit, and 
are now doubly ruined ; first, by the enemy, and then by the nego- 
tiators at Paris ; the goods and negroes owed them being taken 
from them, with all they had besides, and they are now to be 
obliged to pay for what they have been robbed of?" Diplomatic 
Correspondence, vol. lo, pp. 88, 94, 106. "Paper C." 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 125 

causes which finally effected the union of the 
States, by urging the States themselves to move 
towards the formation of a more united and per- 
manent government. Indeed the sentiment among 
some of the leading public men bred in them a 
morbid moral excitement ; as, for example, when 
the celebrated Fisher Ames, of Massachusetts, a 
member of Congress, speaking of the want of faith 
with creditors, said, concerning the formal legal 
contrivances enacted to delay the collection of 
claims, that " Justice was iniquity reduced to ele- 
mentary princijDles ; " and that "in some States 
creditors were treated as outlaws ; bankrupts were 
armed with legal authority to be prosecutors, and 
confidence was forsaking society." ^ " Some of the 
facts," wrote John Jay to Washington, "are inac- 
curately stated and improperly colored ; but it is 
too true that the treaty has been violated. On 
such occasions, I think it better fairly to confess 
and correct errors, than attempt to deceive our- 
selves and others, by fallacious though plausible 
palliations and excuses. To oppose popular prej- 
udices, to censure the proceedings and expose the 
impropriety of States, is an unpleasant task, but it 
must be done." ^ 

1 Fisher Ames' Works, vol. 2, p. 27. 

2 The facts relative to this negotiation are stated in the corre- 
spondence of General Washington. The statement is supported by 
the Secret Journals of Congress, vol. 4, p. 329, and those which 
follow. 



126 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

These will be sufficient to show and distinguish 
the spirit in which the two governments were act- 
ing toward each other and in support of what each 
conceived the interests of their country. 

British policy or resentment at promises unful- 
filled, perhaps both operated in conjunction, were 
aiding the organizing demand in America for 
some government more national, more compre- 
hensive, and more powerful than any possible 
under the enfeebled Confederacy. 

A national party and a state party were now in 
full career. One to hold the people up to the 
performance of the grand task undertaken for their 
ultimate salvation, the other to deal with the ques- 
tion as that of mere practical and present interest. 
In the State of New York the contest between the 
two was to be most earnest and radical. It 
was to give a fresh beginning to principles for 
party strife which were to outlive the immediate 
occasion and strongly mark the future of the State 
and the nation. On that field Hamilton was to 
win the decisive battle for a new Republic. 

It was generally observed, also, that the feelings 
of admiration and respect and hope which had 
pervaded Europe for the American States had be- 
come sadly impaired. The effect of this was to 
sober the Americans into an understanding of 
their true relative position to the rest of the world 
and as between themselves ; and to teach them to 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 27 

investigate and value the nature of the rich and 
abundant springs of prosperity lying within them- 
selves. England, unfortunately for herself, by her 
general conduct, and by her transcendent litera- 
ture more potent than all her other forces, led the 
era of unfriendly feeling with hurtful acts and an 
affected supercilious indifference. Between Amer- 
ica and her all this was to beget a mutual antipath); 
and distrust which nearly three quarters of a cen- 
tury, and many interchanges of courtesy and kind- 
ness and social intercourse of cultivated minds and 
warm kindred hearts, were needed to mitigate and 
efface. George III., who, in 1785, received Mr. 
Adams with cheerful words approving his candor 
and independent manly patriotism,^ turned his 
back, in 1787, upon him and Thomas Jefferson, 
when they together came on a mission to negoti- 
ate treaties of commerce with England and other 
European powers. A slight, equally ill-timed and 
ill-mannered, which encouraged, at least in Jeffer- 
son, a studied contempt for kingly authority and 
office ; and intensified in him those sans culotte 
tastes, which blurred, sometimes, the republican 

^ No witness other than Lord Carmarthen, the official secretary 
of foreign affairs, was admitted to the initiative conference between 
the monarch and his recent subject. " I must avow to your 
majesty," finally added Mr. Adams, significantly, " I have no at- 
tachment but to my own country." The King quickly replied, 
" An honest man will never have any other." — See Life of John 
Adafns, vol. 2, p. loi. 



128 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

simplicity of his true nature.^ The English Whigs, 
who, in 1774-75, were so enthusiastic for the con- 

1 Mr. Merry was the British Minister to the United States in 
1803. He thus related to the Hon. Josiah Quincy, of Massachu- 
setts, his first presentation as such minister officially to the Presi- 
dent, Jefferson : *' I called on Mr. Madison (then Secretary of 
State) who accompanied me officially to introduce me to the Presi- 
dent. We went together to the mansion-house ; I being in full 
official costume, as the etiquette of my place required on such a 
formal introduction of a minister from Great Britain to the Presi- 
dent of the United States. On arriving at the hall of audience, 
we found it empty ; at which Mr. Madison seemed surprised, and 
proceeded to an entry leading to the President's study. I fol- 
lowed him, supposing the introduction was to take place in the 
adjoining room. At this moment Mr. Jefferson entered the entry 
at the other end, and all three of us were packed in this narrow 
space, from which, to make room, I was obliged to back out. In 
this awkward position my introduction to the President was made 
by Mr. Madison. Mr. Jefferson's appearance soon explained to 
me that the general circumstances of my reception had not been 
accidental, but studied. I, in my official costume, found myself at 
the hour of reception he had himself appointed, introduced to a 
man as President of the United States, not merely in an undress, 
but actually standing in slippers down at the heels, and both pant- 
aloons, coat, and under-clothes indicative of utter slovenliness and 
indifference to appearances ; and in a state of negligence actually 
studied. I could not doubt that the whole scene was prepared 
and intended as an insult, not to me personally, but to the sover- 
eign I represented." Moore, the Irish poet, who went to the United 
States in the same packet-ship with Mr. and Mrs. Merry, knew of, 
and sympathized with the British Minister in, his indignation, and 
the rhapsodist relieved his friends and his own mind by a few 
sharp iambics at the Presidential Democrat : as an 

" Inglorious soul, 
Which creeps and winds beneath a mob's control, 
Which courts the rabble's smile, the rabble's nod." 

There should be no doubt that the conduct of Jefferson at this time 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 129 

ciliatlon of America, were not now to be found 
among those Englishmen who favored the ac- 
knowledgment of her independence of the British 
crown. These Whigs were most conspicuous for 
their novel coldness. Indeed, such are the 
changes and chances of political affairs, those pro- 
posals which were to promote a gracious and pol- 
itic course were advised by men eminent in the 
Tory ranks.^ Lord Mansfield it was who had man- 
aged the delicate task for the introductory recep- 
tion of Mr. Adams as first American Minister ; and 
it was William Pitt, inheriting his father's sincere 

"was prepared." Those who knew him well, including Hamilton, 
concur in speaking of his natural and usual manner as dignified 
and becoming the exalted positions which he held. He had been 
too accustomed to the proprieties of such and all kinds of official and 
social intercourse, in the highest and most poHte circles in America 
and Europe, to be otherwise than purposely at fault. It was a 
piece of unseemly and unfortunate actino-. 

1 "Standing in the lobby of the House of Lords, surrounded by 
a hundred of the first people of the kingdom. Sir Francis Molineux 
the gentleman usher of the black rod, appeared suddenly in the 
room, with his long staff, and roared out, with a very loud voice • 
'Where is Mr. Adams, Lord Mansfield's friend?' I frankly 
avowed myself Lord Mansfield's friend ; and was politely con- 
ducted, by Sir Francis, to my place Pope had given me, 

when a boy, an affection for Murray. When in the study and 
practice of the law, my admiration of the learning, talents and 
eloquence of Mansfield had been constantly increasing, though 
some of his opinions I could not approve. His politics in American 
affairs I had always detested. But now I found more politeness 
and good-humor in him than in Richmond, Camden, Burke, or 
Fox." — Zz/^ of John Adams, vol. 2, p. 82. 
9 



ISO ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

desire to admit American rights and immunities, 
who, as chancellor of the Shelburne Administra- 
tion, advocated a liberal course in commercial 
affairs, and introduced into Parliament a bill in- 
tended to secure the States advantages identical 
with those secured to the subjects of Great Britain, 
especially as regards her colonies in America. 
Had such a bill become a law, a wonderful emol- 
lient would have been applied to irritable interests ; 
and reciprocal benefits to the trades and common 
intercourse of both countries would have flowed 
from its well-conceived friendly purport. George 
III. is frequently said by satirists to have been 
the responsible father of American independence. 
Truth lurks in satire. It was even yet a hard 
thing, so late as 1785, for any man or passion to 
entirely alienate the proudly filial affections of the 
people of British descent in America from the duti- 
ful respect which they seem always willing to pay 
to the institutions and literature of England.^ 

^ This inclination was, and is, very observable among people of 
generous minds in America. Adams, Jay, Governeur Morris, 
Kent, Marshall, and Webster, ever expressed their devotedness to 
the principles of English liberty and constitutional law. The eccen- 
tric, brilliant genius, John Randolph of Roanoke, once charged with 
being under " British influence," spoke a popular feeling when he 
fervently said in his place in Congress, " I acknowledge the influ- 
ence of a Shakespeare and a Milton on my imagination : of a Bacon 
upon my philosophy : of a Sherlock upon my religion : of a Locke 
upon my understanding : and of a Chatham upon qualities which, 
would to God, I possessed in common with that extraordinary man. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 131 

The philosophers who opened the way for the 
crusade against order and perfect freedom in 
France, and some of her statesmen, like Ver- 
gennes, knew of this tendency, and would not have 
the United States become too great; they rather 
desired to preserve for England so much strength 
in North America, that the two powers might 
watch, restrain, and balance each other/ It was 
to this end that Vergennes had advised the nego- 
tiations of peace to be with each State, and not to 
insist on their being conducted by England as if 
the States were a united and entire nation ; and, 
with similar design, he had pressed upon Jay a 
settlement of claims with Spain. Now, Spain was 
no friend to the new-comer among nationalities. 
Its "government singularly feared the prosperity 

and progress of the Americans Spain would 

be much inclined to stipulate for such a form of 
independence as may leave divisions between Eng- 
land and her colonies." ^ Aranda, the Spanish 
Ambassador, met Jay in company with La Fayette, 
at Versailles, on September 26, 1782. "When 
shall we proceed to do business ? " asked the Span- 
iard. " When you communicate your powers to 

This is a British influence which I acknowledge." This is quoted 
from memory ; and, though the writer cannot be entirely certain 
as to its merely verbal accuracy, he is certain that it is substantially 
correct. 

^ Raynal's History of the Two Indies, vol. 9, p. 318, edit. 178 1. 

^ Montmorin to Vergennes, October 15, 1778. 



132 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

treat," answered the American. " An exchange of 
commissions cannot be expected, for Spain has 
not acknowledged your independence," suggested 
Aranda. " We have declared our independence," 
replied Jay. The fine hauteur of his Huguenot 
descent lent fire to his American patriotism. 
France itself had entered into the war chiefly to 
cripple England, and to regain her former territo- 
ries and prestige. Trustworthy intelligence had 
already come from the United States of the strong 
attachment of its people to England; Turgot rea- 
soned that, from habit and consanguinity, their 
commerce would return there ; and Vergennes ac- 
knowledged that he had doubts of their firmness 
and fidelity.^ The Great Frederic of Prussia had, 
in view of the state of his own affairs, to lessen his 
aid to expressions of sympathy ; and was able to 
say no further, practically, than that he would not 
hesitate to recognize the independence of the 
United States, "when France, which is more di- 
rectly interested in the event of this contest, shall 
have given the example." ^ So it is seen that with 
France, Spain, and Prussia really wishing but to 
"cripple" England, she herself was unwittingly, 
for once, giving new life to their original purpose ; 
a purpose defeated at the treaty at Paris, in 1783, 
mainly by Jay and Adams, who knew of the object 

^ Vergennes to Montmorin, November 2, 1778. 
"^ Schulemberg to Arthur Lee, January 16, 1778. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 133 

at which the Other powers aimed. « You are afraid " 
said the British commissioner, Mr. Oswald at that 
time, to John Adams, "of being made the 'tools of 
Ae powers of Europe." " Indeed I am," answered 
Mr. Adams. " What powers .? " returned Mr Os 
wald. "All of them," was the candid admission 
from Mr. Adams. The independence of the thir- 
teen American States had no sincere, unselfish 
tnend among the nations of Europe — the pros- 
perity of those States, as an independent united 
nation, was now apparent to be equally unsuitable 
to their policies.^ The schemes of Vergennes for 
the irreparable scission of the British empire" 
and his manipulations of circumstances to sub- 
ordinate the States into unconscious instrumen- 
talities and aids to those schemes, are very inter- 
esting.-- The French Minister's "sole object was 
the disruption of the British empire without the 
aid of any European power, except Spain." The 
latter power was alarmed by the dangerous exam- 
ple which the independence of the States would 
give to the Spanish-American colonies. The de 
signs of France and Spain were again favored by 
the course which events were now taking The 
United States, according to those original designs, 

D ^^^^"7f Correspondence of the American Revolution, vol 6 
p. 483 ; and the Ltfe of Lord Shelburne, vol. 3 p 300 

pp' rr^sf rt- " T" '"'^ " ''^ "^^^ ^-^>^-^ ^^--^ vol. r, 
pp. 420-4S4, and in vol 2, p. 22. 



134 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

were to have been confined to a strip of land on 
the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, bounded by lines 
nearly like those which France contended for 
against England after the treaty of Utrecht; Spain 
was to have held West and East Florida, and to 
claim that these extended to the interior and 
reached the great lakes ; England was to have 
had the territories north of the Ohio, as defined 
by the Quebec Act of 1774 ; the country between 
Florida and the Cumberland was to have been 
left to the Indians, who were to be placed under 
the protection of Spain and the United States ; 
and thus it would be that England, Spain, and the 
United States would watch, restrain, and balance 
each other, and make France the paramount power. 
This Vergennes meant to have insured as the 
result of his covert practices in arranging the 
terms of the proposed peace. The claim of the 
United States to have its western boundary on 
the Mississippi was to have been denied ; as was, 
also, that of the right of fishery on the banks off 
Newfoundland.^ Jay, as we have already inti- 
mated,^ knew from an early time of these schemes ; 
and John Adams had, of his own observation, 
causes to suspect the good faith of Vergennes. 
It was the certain knowledge of these schemes 

^ Life of John Jay, vol. i, pp. 120, 143, 144, and in vol. 2, pp. 
472-477. 

2 Afite, pp. 57-58 of Part I. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 135 

which had brought the English government and 
the American commissioners to an understanding 
speedily and, apart from the cooperation of Ver- 
gennes, to negotiate and conclude the prelimina- 
ries of the peace. Turgot, it is since then dis- 
closed, had been consulted by Louis the Sixteenth 
himself, and had approved of Vergennes' policy. 
The official papers of Vergennes, and the written 
advice of Turgot, discovered in the famous iron- 
chest of that ill-fated monarch, have made public 
how few, beyond the generous La Fayette and his 
immediate consociates, are justly entitled to the in- 
discriminate laudation and gratitude with which it 
is habitual with us to speak of the France of that 
epoch. The schemes of those two kingdoms re- 
mained unchanged even after the peace of 1783. 
The disturbed condition of the States, and their 
continued repugnance to national unity and a 
common government, gave reasonable hope to 
France and Spain that their ambitious several 
purposes might yet be accomplished. The effect 
which the detected intrigues had upon the course 
of Washington's Administration, in establishing 
the policy of having no " entangling alliances " 
with foreign nations, will require our attention in 
a subsequent Part of this study. 

But the sturdy conduct of George III. was to 
accomplish great events; among others to alienate 
awhile the kind feelings of his former subjects. 



136 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

and to help that pressure which was forcing them 
into a "soHd union." The Shelburne ministry, 
excepting, perhaps, WiUiam Pitt, were his very able 
ally. Positive, hostile legislation. Orders in Coun- 
cil, which were "war in disguise," and, over and 
beyond all, that old ever-pervading affectation of 
insulting pride, made many improbable hopes, 
beneficial to America, come speedily and unex- 
pectedly to pass ; and chiefly among them conces- 
sions from the several States toward a union com- 
petent to the purposes of nationality and domin- 
ion. American interests had become thoroughly 
alarmed ; American pride stung to the quick and 
excited into action. The sting was the more 
severe because, in part, thought to be deserved. 
Lord Shelburne watched with hopeful eagerness 
the progress of disaffection and consequent im- 
pending disasters in America: for Congress had 
exhausted its vitality, and publicly declared its 
impotency. And now the absurdity of the Con- 
federacy was more fully declared by the failure to 
get even the impost. This was done too by the 
non-conformity of a single State. The significant, 
unequivocal fact was accepted by English politi- 
cians as a finality : the end of any further attempt 
looking to a united government, and, as surely, 
of course, the end of all devices and means on the 
part of the American States and their discarded 
Confederacy to provide for the public debts. The 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 37 

understanding of men, especially in Europe, be- 
came convinced from the repeated failures of these 
Congressional ventures that a union of the States 
in an efificient and responsible form of govern- 
ment, was to be taken as forever impracticable and 
would now be abandoned. 

The English ministry conducted its foreign 
affairs as though anarchy was from the first closely 
following peace in America ; and that the labors 
of the Revolution would be quickly lost in the loss 
of liberty itself. The condition of feeling and the 
motives of political parties in England at this time 
have been freely and accurately described by Mr. 
Charles Francis Adams, who has himself patriot- 
ically, honorably, and usefully filled the ofhce of 
Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James, 
during a time not less imminent to the continued 
existence of his country.^ The policy of England 

^ Lord Sheffield . . . . " painted the ruin and confusion in 
which the colonists were involved by the state of anarchy conse- 
quent upon their independence. And he ventured to whisper the 
prediction that, out of this chaos,New England, at least, would, in 
the end, solicit to come back as a repentant child to the maternal 
embrace. These arguments finally carried the day. In July of 
the year 1783, the exclusive system was decreed, first by Orders in 
Council, then by temporary acts of Parliament. The United States 
were treated as utter strangers, and carefully shut out from trade 
with the colonies. Restrictions and commercial jealousy were the 
order of the day. The demonstrations were viewed by all Amer- 
icans as hostile in spirit, and therefore to be met in the same 
manner. The failure of all efforts to establish an effective counter- 
system of restriction went a great way to rouse them to a sense of 



130 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

was then finally settled by the Shelburne adminis- 
tration. It was restriction. The healing method 
proposed by Pitt was rejected. To cripple and 
destroy the American States, and reduce them to 
suppliant colonies, was the object. The English 
ministry failed again. " War in disguise " was as 
fruitless as open war had been. The wrath of 
man worked unto the purpose of the union. For 
the arms which were to overcome and end this 
sea of trouble were to be sought and to be found 
only in a consolidation of the States in a common 
government; by that alone strength could come 
and authority be secured; past indebtedness be 
provided for out of the abundance of means for 

the necessity of a better form of government. Pride came in aid 
of principle, stimulating the sluggish, and quickening the timid, 
until the cry for a new confederacy became general. The pam- 
phlet of Lord Sheffield had its effect upon the formation and adop- 
tion of the Federal Constitution of 1788. Thus it often happens 
with nations that think to make a gain out of the embarrassments 
and miseries of their neighbors. Indignation at once supplies the 
vigor to apply a remedy, which, had the matter been left to reason 
alone, might have been put off a great while or never been resorted 
to at all. Lord Sheffield's interference must be classed among the 
secondary misfortunes which befell Great Britain in the disastrous 
record of the American War ; whilst among the people of America 
it deserves to be remembered with satisfaction as a conversion of 
what was intended to be a poison into a restoring medicine." — 
Life of John Ada?ns, vol. 2, p. 105. See Life of Lord Shelbnrne, 
vol. 3, p. 263, relating the unfriendly suggestion of the emissary of 
Vergennes to Shelburne as to the claims of the United States to 
the Newfoundland fishery and to the Valley of the Mississippi and 
the Ohio, 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 139 

national wealth; credit be restored at home and 
abroad; manufactures encouraged, and trade re- 
vived and extended. 

England had, in fact, immediately after the 
peace of 1783, entered actively upon an epoch of 
aggressiveness and of defense. Aggressive, on 
behalf of her traditional assumption of the domin- 
ion of the seas : which 't^as to reinforce the em- 
pire of her navigation, and to keep open and 
maintain to her own use and management the 
markets of the world; defensive, as the trusted 
champion of legitimate liberty on the continent of 
Europe. The French Revolution soon in bloody 
act denounced the divine right of kings ; filled 
Europe with apprehension for its established 
order and peace; and boasted a special hostility 
to England and its constitutional freedom. That 
revolution developed into the Consulate; the Con- 
sulate into the Empire ; and on the field of Water- 
loo alone was Europe assured of protection from 
universal conquest, given repose, and England's 
station in European affairs at once confirmed. 
No such moral or physical triumph followed the 
selfish career of England in her attempt to fasten 
again upon the world her assumed dominion of 
the seas. It brought her and the United States 
once more, in 181 2-14, into what may be correctly 
called a complementary war, and its issue freed 
the open seas from that assertion of exclusive 



I40 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

dominion; but in 1861, when the surrender of 
Messrs. Mason and Slidell was demanded from 
the United States, England finally renounced, by 
necessary inference, the doctrine itself, insisting, 
upon that occasion in her own behalf, for the 
right principle vindicated by America in that war 
of 1812.1 

1 Lord Lyndhurst, in his speech on the Right of Search Ques- 
tion, in the House of Lords, July 26, 1858, had already said : " Many 
persons — perhaps I ought not to say * many persons,' but several 
persons, and those in a high pohtical position — appear to think 
that .... we have surrendered a most valuable and important 
right. The answer which I make to that is, that we have sur- 
rendered no right, for that, in point of fact, no such right as that 
which is contended for [the right of search] has ever existed. We 
have, my Lords, abandoned the assumption of a right, and in doing 
so we have, I think, acted justly, prudently, and wisely." He then 
proceeds to observe " upon the general question," and refers to 
"some of the most eminent authorities on the subject," including 
Lord Stowell, to the end that the " question should be distinctly 
and finally understood and settled." " A distinction," he continues, 
"has been attempted to be drawn — for which I think there is no 
foundation — between the right of visit and the right of search. 
Visit and search are two words which are always placed together 
in our vocabulary of international law, but they express what is 
conveyed by a single term in foreign vocabularies, ' le droit de 
visite! What is the use of visiting if you can do nothing 1 . . . . 
The moment you call for an examination of the papers, the mo- 
ment you ask a single question, the visit becomes a search ; so 
that the visit to a particular vessel for the purpose of inquiry, is, 
in effect, the exercise of a right, comprehended in the words droit 
de visite I think I have now gone far enough," he con- 
cludes, " to establish the position with which I started : that 
there is, in truth, no such thing as the right of visit." — Hansard's 
Parliatnentary Debates, vol. 151 (3d series), pp. 2078-2083. Gro- 
tius' Mare Libenim, published in 1609, in which he asserts that the 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 141 

Such was the condition of the American States 
at this complex crisis [i 785-1 787]. Practically 
segregating as a nationality from the family of 
nations ; threatened and endangered from abroad ; 
dissolving into hostile communities at home. 

Yet it was within, and by the influence, of these 
several and converging hostile circumstances that 
the Republic came forth. 

sea is a common open and free to the use of all nations. That 
treatise was really designed for a defense of the maritime rights of 
the Dutch. Selden's answer, published in 1635, entitled Mare 
Clasum, or, as its enlarged title declares, " The Closed Sea j or 
Two Books concetyihig the Dominion of the Sea. In the first, it is 
demonstrated that the sea, by the law of nature and of nations, is 
not comtnon to tnankind, but is capable of private dojni?iion, or prop- 
erty, eqiially with the land. In the second, it is maintained that the 
King of Great Britaiji is lord of the circtimfluent sea, as an insep- 
arable and perpetual appendage of the British Empire.^^ Selden's 
book was translated into English by Marchmont Needham, and 
printed in 1652, with an appendix of additional documents by Pres- 
ident Bradshaw. See, likewise, War in Disguise,- or, the Frauds of 
the Neutral Flags {London, 1805) ; a remarkable and most eloquent 
pamphlet, published anonymously, but since admitted to have been 
written by the celebrated James Stephen, M. P. ; and, also, An 
Answer to War in Disguise : or. Remarks upon the New Doctrine 
of England concerning Neutral Trade (New York, 1806). Gouver- 
neur Morris was the author of the latter. These pamphlets made 
a wide and profound impression at the time they appeared. They 
are long since out of print, and are now little known. 

As to the revolt of the American colonists, the late Lord Derby, 
in a frank spirit of inteUigent candor, "unreservedly admitted, 
in a speech delivered in the presence of an American minister, 
that we were right in the Revolutionary contest ; and if that 
question were now submitted to the free judgment of the people of 
England, such would be found to be the public sense of that great 
nation." — President Van Buren's Political Parties, p. 14. 



142 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

Few perceived that germs of life were begin- 
ning to stir and glow in amid the States themselves. 
Fewer saw hope for blossoms and fruit to come. 
Amone those few who felt national life at last 
stirring beneath the surface of sectional interests 
and state antipathy, and who fervently cherished 
the indication, was Alexander Hamilton. 

" There is a day in spring 
When under all the earth the secret germs 
Begin to stir and glow before they bud : 
The wealth and festal pomps of midsummer 
Lie in the heart of that inglorious day, 
Which no man names with blessing — though its work 
Is blest by all the world." ^ 

And such days there are in the slow story of 
the growth of durable and grand empire. 

The constitutions of the separate States were 
each admirable and excellent ; their political sys- 
tems rested on an approved principle suitable to 
the genius and history of its own people. John 
Adams had explained and vindicated their excel- 
lence in his " Defence of the Constitutions of 
Government of the United States of America, 
against the Attack of M. Turgot," published in 
London, in 1787, and republished there in 1794. 
But a national government was the imperative, 
overwhelming, controlling necessity of the present 
safety and future prosperity and existence of those 
States, even in their separate organizations. 

1 Story of Qiieen Isabel. By Miss S medley. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 43 

The slow story of that day has often been told. 
How it was that a comprehensive and permanent 
union of the States came, at length, to be consid- 
ered in general convention ; how, from the wise 
counsel of Washington, came the first practica- 
ble movement which led to the consummation 
of a union. This was the first step which really 
counted. For from that moment, uncertain as 
many of them were, each step afterwards, by neces- 
sary inductions, proceeded surely to the desired 
object. 

It was in March, 1785, that a few gentlemen, 
citizens of Virginia and of Maryland, commission- 
ers on behalf of those States, went to. Mount Ver- 
non, there to confer with General Washington. 
Those gentlemen were then attending a joint com- 
mission at Alexandria, a neighboring town on the 
Potomac river. They wished to profit by the ad- 
vice of Washington on the local affairs which en- 
gaged their attention. Many of the States were 
getting more and more involved in the ever-recur- 
ring and increasingly serious disputes concerning 
the exercise of their right to navigate the bays and 
rivers which spread and flow between their border- 
lands. We remember that there was then no cen- 
tral power, no acknowledged common supreme 
authority over all the States, which could inter- 
vene and regulate that subject. Wherefore it was 
that the States of Virginia and of Maryland had 



144 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

determined upon this joint effort to adjust those 
rights, and free the navigation of the rivers Po- 
tomac and Pocomoke, and Chesapeake Bay, for 
and between themselves. The conference with 
General Washington begat a wider purpose for 
the action of the commissioners, so that not only 
might the navigation of those waters be cleared 
of all embarrassing exercise of rights, but harmo- 
nious commercial regulations between the two 
States miojht be settled and established. Still 
wider influence was to result from the impulse of 
this scheme, — an influence which makes that visit 
ever memorable in American legend. That the 
first suggestion came from Washington himself is 
not to be asserted. It certainly arose, in its prac- 
ticable shape, from the conference held on that 
day at Mount Vernon. It is very likely that it 
was introduced there by Madison, and approved 
by Washington and all others present,^ as politic 
and desirable. To Mr. Madison appears to belong 
" the credit of having originated that series of Vir- 
ginia measures which brought about the meeting 
of commissioners of all the States at Annapolis, for 
the purpose of enlarging the powers of Congress 
over commerce; while Hamilton is to be consid- 
ered the author of the plan in which the conven- 

^ George Mason and Alexander Henderson on the part of Vir- 
ginia ; and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, Thomas Stone and 
Samuel Chase, on that of Maryland. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 45 

tion at Annapolis was merged, for an entire revis- 
ion of the federal system, and the formation of a 
new constitution." -^ \ 

In pursuance of the recommendations which 
the joint commissioners made to the legislatures 
of their respective States, communicating to each 
the proceedings and advice of the meeting at 
Alexandria, resolutions, drafted by Madison, were 
passed, and representatives were appointed to 
" meet such commissioners as may be appointed 
by the other States in the union, to take into con- 
sideration the trade of the United States ; to ex- 
amine the relative situation and trade of the said 
States ; to consider how far a uniform system in 
their commercial regulations may be necessary to 
their common interest and their permanent har- 
mony."^ The commerce of the States with for- 
eign nations must be had in our view if we would 
rightly estimate the history of those causes which 
ultimately established the union of the States. It 
was, perhaps, the most potential. But this plan 
from the two States, it will be observed, had no 
national purpose ; it embraced a project for a con- 
vention to deal with inter-state commercial sub- 
jects merely : great and urgent, yet limited in its 
sphere to that which might be done by a treaty 

1 Curtis' History of the Constitution of the United States, vol. i, 
page 425 ; Sparks' Life of Washington, vol. 1, page 428 ; and 
Washington's Writings, vol. 9, page 509. 

" Life and Times of James Madison^ by Rives, vol. 2, page 60. 



146 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

between independent sovereign States in a league. 
The idea of a national compact did not lodge in 
its contemplation. The plan, however, began the 
lead which inclined the public mind to regard as 
feasible and proper the practice of public repre- 
sentatives meeting and advising upon public af- 
fairs, distinct and apart from the Congress of the 
Confederation. Congress had dwindled down to a 
migratory body of about twenty members.-^ The 
able men of the country were no longer there. 
Hamilton had retired. Resolutions, which he had 
intended to submit to that body in 1783, showing 
essential points wherein the Confederation of the 

1 " On the 3d of November, 1783, a new Congress, according to 
annual custom, was assembled at Annapolis, and attended by only 
fifteen members, from seven States. Two great acts awaited the 
attention of this assembly, — both of an interesting and important 
character, both of national concern. The one was the resignation 
of Washington ; a solemnity which appealed to every feeling of 
national gratitude and pride, and which would seem to have de- 
manded whatever of pomp and dignity and power the United States 
could display. The other was a legislative act, which was to give 
peace to the country by the ratification of the Treaty. Several 
weeks passed on, and yet the attendance was not much increased. 
Washington's resignation was received at a public audience 01 
seven States, represented by about twenty delegates ; and on the 
same day letters were dispatched to the other States, urging them, 
for the safety, honor, and good faith of the United States, to re- 
quire the immediate attendance of their members. It was not, 
however, until the 14th of January, that the Treaty could be ratified 
by the constitutional number of nine States ; and, when this took 
place, there were present but three-and-twenty members." — Cur- 
tis' History of the Constitution of the United States, vol. r, pp. 
235-237- 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 47 

United States was defective, were never presented, 
but were " abandoned for want of support."^ Nev- 
ertheless, Congress was the only formal and legiti- 
mate power; and, being such, could not prudently 
be disregarded. It was by its authority that the 
States were to be called to order and assemble 
in the great Convention of 1787; so preserving 
the modes and form of constitutional law. At 
Annapolis there were brought together,- in pursu- 
ance of its recommendation, enlightened minds 
disposed and able to attempt greater things. In 
those competent hands the simple topic of com- 
mercial intercourse and navigation was made to 
evolve the generous idea of national unity and 
power in a way which grew to be acceptable to the 
States, and, also, to the Congress. 

New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia, were 
the chief centres and sources of public opinion. 
How Virginia stood inclined towards the plan 
proposed was clearly evinced by its own legisla- 
tive act commending it to the other States. Mas- 
sachusetts took no part. Its Governor (James 
Bowdoin), a wise and firm statesman, careless of 
unsubstantial, evanescent, popular applause, and 
devoted to the principles of orderly and strong 
government, had already sent to the legislature a 

1 Hamilton's Works, vol. 2, pp. 269-275. These resolutions, 
which are preserved, bear this indorsement in his own hand- 
writing : " Intended to be submitted to Congress in seventeen 
hundred and eighty-three, but abandoned for want of support." 



148 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

message (May 31, 1785), advising the appointment 
of special delegates to settle and define the powers 
with which Congress ought to be invested. From 
this message ensued a solemn legislative act, de- 
claring the Articles of Confederation incapable of 
effecting the benefit of proper government, and 
advising Congress to recommend a meeting of 
delegates from the States themselves, in a distinct 
body, to revise those Articles, and to report to 
Congress the parts and the extent to which the 
Articles might be changed and enlarged, so as to 
enable it to fulfill the demands and ends for which 
government is instituted. Letters from the Gov- 
ernor to the Governors of the other States, and to 
the President of Congress, were sent, representing 
the necessity for the proposition. The resolutions 
were forwarded to the members from Massachu- 
setts then in Congress, with instructions to present 
them. Objection was made by those members, 
and they determined not to obey instructions — 
not to present the resolutions. Congress was in 
no proper vein to receive such proposals. A 
movement of the kind was thought to be, in any 
view, premature. It was indeed true, that the Con- 
gress of the Confederation was as little disposed 
that M^ay in 1785 as it had been in 1783, when 
Hamilton abandoned his scheme. The delegates 
from that State, after allowing two months to pass, 
and acting under the prejudice of the dominant 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 49 

but sincere antipathies, only then declared to the 
Governor their reasons for not acting in compli- 
ance with the instructions received by thcm.^ The 
General Court of Massachusetts^ immediately re- 
scinded what it had ordered : and Massachusetts 
was not represented at the commercial convention 
assembling at Annapolis. '^The gathering ele- 
ments of distress had to become more severe and 
penetrating; the blight to spread farther among 
the industries and commerce of the people ; their 
money more and more drained from the com- 
munity to pay remainders against imports from 
foreign countries ; Great Britain and other nations 
to continue restrictions paralyzing trade, and in 
the autumn of 1 786 an insurrection to break forth, 
so full of peril to the existence of Massachusetts 
herself, that the present generation seem incapable 
of duly estimating its dangerous character ; ^ these 

1 " Reasons assigned for suspending the delivery to Congress 
of the Governor's letters for revising and altering the Confed- 
eration." — Life of Hajnilton^ by his son, vol. 2, p. 353. 

"^ By which title the legislative assembly of that State was known. 

8 Rufus King, who was, at the period we speak of (1785), a del- 
egate from Massachusetts, and united with his colleagues in op- 
posing the movement for a convention, wrote, early in 1787, to El- 
bridge Gerry, one of those colleagues, earnestly asking his assist- 
ance to have a convention called as the measure demanded by the 
pubhc peace and safety. " Events," he said, referring to "Shays' 
Rebellion," " are hurrying us to a crisis ; prudent and sagacious 
men should be ready to seize the most favorable circumstances to 
establish a more perfect and vigorous government." — Life of 
Gerry, vol. 2, pp. 7, 8. 



I50 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

and other compelling forces had yet to converge 
before that and many States were entirely disci- 
plined, so as not only to accept, but to seek for, a 
central authority and federo-national government 
as the inexorable recourse for their perishing com- 
merce and navigation. Thus it was that at this 
conjuncture New York was called upon to do the 
important part. The political conduct of that State 
gave no encouragement that she would stir herself 
beyond those duties which she had, by a series of 
acts, declared to be her first and exclusive care. 
The power of levying a national impost, proposed 
in the revenue system of 1783, had been stub- 
bornly withheld from Congress by her Legislature. 
Ever since the peace with England the people 
of the State had been divided, as we have seen, 
between two parties : those which advocated the 
concession of competent powers to Congress, and 
those which adhered to preserving the sovereignty 
of the State. The belief that the commercial ad- 
vantage, relatively, of New York, was to be better 
raised up and supported by keeping to herself the 
power to collect her own public revenues, gave the 
State-party a popular ascendency. In 1784 was 
established a custom-house and a revenue system. 
In 1785, a proposition to grant requested author- 
ity to Congress was lost in .the Senate, and in 
1786 it had become necessary for Congress to 
bring the question to a final issue. Three other 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 151 

States, — Rhode Island, Maryland, and Georgia, 

— stood with New York in a like attitude, hav- 
ing decided in favor of no part of the plans which 
Congress had so earnestly and so repeatedly urged 
upon them for adoption.-^ The great body of the 
citizens of New York had long estimated their 
State sufficient in and for itself.^ Sufficient, un- 
questionably, in its natural resources, rapidly con- 
centrating the elements of a nation, the ease and 
independence of separate existence seemed to com- 
mend its continuance. Her ample dominions ex- 
tended then, as now, their shores along the waters 
of immense interior lakes ; two convergent, capa- 
cious, highways brought the foreign commerce of 
Europe and of the East to her chief city and com- 
mercial emporium; the Hudson River thence, 

^ Qmiis's History of the Constitution of the United States, vol. i, 

PP- 343-344- 

2 Alexis De Tocqueville, in a review of the allotment of consti- 
tutional power between the States and the National Government, 
observes that " the Union is a vast body which presents no defi- 
nite object to patriotic feeling. The forms and limits of the State 
are distinct and circumscribed, since it represents a certain number 
of objects which are familiar to the citizens and beloved by all. It 
is identified with the very soil, with the right of property, and the 
domestic affections ; with the recollections of the past, the labors 
of the present, and the hopes of the future. Patriotism, then, which 
is frequently a mere extension of individual egotism, is still directed 
to the State, and is not excited by the Union. Thus the tendency 
of the interests, the habits, and the feelings of the people is to 
centre political activity in the States in preference to the Union." 

— Democracy in America, vol. i, pp. 448, 449. 



152 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

with its wide and deep stream, afforded rarest fa- 
cilities for more than one hundred and sixty con- 
secutive miles throus^h the centre of her domin- 
ions ; and those waters of Lake Erie and of Lake 
Ontario, following the lines of her northeastern 
limits, went by the banks of the voluminous St. 
Lawrence towards the Atlantic. Those lakes of- 
fered to her the resources of the great West, and 
those safe and short avenues to the ocean invited 
the commerce of the world to enter secure and 
prosperous ports. But this geographical position, 
lying between the Eastern and the Middle States, 
will, in the course of consequences now at hand, 
expose New York to political dangers, and will 
create one of the persuasions inducing her to en- 
ter a determinate union. 

It was at this conjuncture that the figure of 
Hamilton emerges, and advances more conspicu- 
ously to the front of the stage of public action. 
He felt the stir of coming events. Circumscribed 
as was the object of the meeting proposed by Vir- 
ginia, Hamilton, having anticipated the likelihood 
of such an occasion, — one opening, as he saw, a 
way by which his long-cherished hope might be 
satisfied, — with his habitual quickness and earn- 
estness seized the opportunity, and, by most per- 
sistent and prudent efforts, long doubtful, induced 
the Legislature of the State of New York to ap- 
point commissioners to attend the convention. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 53 

The influence of Hamilton was acknowledged, 
and his importance impliedly avowed by being ap- 
pointed one of those commissioners. His activity 
was ceaseless and marvelous in promoting disposi- 
tions, in representative quarters, for entertaining 
any proposition looking toward a general assem- 
bly of citizens of all the States, to discuss subjects 
relating to the necessity for, and the benefits of, a 
more firm and perfect system for public affairs. 
His opinions and labors were known to many of 
those who were to meet with him at Annapolis. 

Commissioners from the States of New York, 
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia, 
following their instructions, met at Annapolis, in 
the State of Maryland, on the eleventh day of 
September, 1786. John Dickinson, of Delaware, 
was chosen to preside. Bred to the bar, venerable 
at that time (1786) in years, learned and eloquent, 
of great ability and experience, genuine in his 
love of country, spotless and pure in reputation, 
firm and dignified in character, he is justly placed 
in the best rank of the rare statesmen of that 
rare period. While the conscientious inflexibility 
of his understanding would not permit him to 
unite in subscribing the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, which he looked upon as premature and un- 
wise, yet when independence was declared, no one 
maintained at greater hazard in field and in coun- 
cil the chosen course. The cloud of unpopular- 



154 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

ity which this refusal gathered about him, soon 
dispersed before the splendor of his patriotic devo- 
tion. In Congress, as President of the Common- 
wealth of Pennsylvania, immediately preceding 
therein Franklin, and by the closing labors of his 
life in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, his 
toil was rich in the fruit of noble public acts. He 
died at Wilmington, in the State of Delaware, in 
1808, aged seventy-five years. Only five States 
appeared. The representatives appointed by New 
Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and 
North Carolina, none of them attended ; and the 
remainder of the States had not even appointed 
delegates. Some saw nothing in the proposed 
object of the assembling which concerned them; 
some saw merely an invitation to give up a part 
of their valuable individual vantage-ground ; some 
suspected it an insidious initiation into a com- 
panionship leading to an assumption of the pub- 
lic debts ; and, more prevalent than all these, the 
idea of union had long since ceased to interest 
them. Those who attended remained but three 
days in session : then adjourned without day. Yet 
the secret germs of a perfect union of the States 
lay in the heart of those inglorious days; and 
forth came the bud, at last, its work to be blest 
by all the world. 

A new era had, in fact, begun. Younger men 
were appearing and taking important places at the 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 55 

head. Those who ten years ago led in debate, in 
council, or in war, were now at rest awhile, or 
were doing public service in their own States or 
at foreign courts. Washington was finding con- 
genial and refreshing diversion in tilling the soil 
at Mount Vernon ; Jefferson was at Versailles, 
his imagination excited by the flames of that 
French philosophy — theory without facts — which 
were soon to set France ablaze to its destruction, 
and be a reproach and set-back to republicanism ; 
Adams tarried in England : failing in all impor- 
tant objects of his mission,-^ he did not fail to 
fully explain and powerfully vindicate the con- 
stitutions of the States of America and to con- 
front hostile opinion ; Jay, returned from his dip- 
lomatic strifes in Spain and France, was at the 
head of the bureau for Foreign Affairs ; Oli- 
ver Ellsworth,^ had left Congress and was pre- 

1 Life of yohn Adams, by Charles Francis Adams, vol. 2, p. 127. 

^ He was of English descent, and was born at Windsor, Con- 
necticut, on the 29th of April, 1745. His influence upon the for- 
mation of the Constitution, in 1787, was special and pecuHar. To 
him, Roger Sherman, his colleague and " great example," and to 
William Patterson, of New Jersey, the late John C. Calhoun said 
it was due that the States were prevented from being merged in a 
common national government, and their political sovereignty not 
lost. — (Calhoun's J^<?ry^j-, vol. 4, p. 354.) Ellsworth was the most 
earnest and the ablest advocate of what was called the " States- 
Rights Party." It was he who objected to the term National 
Government, and proposed, instead, the Government of the United 
States. He was, afterwards, from 4th of March, 1796, to near the 
close of 1800, the Chief Justice of the United States. While hold- 



156 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

siding in the Superior Court of his native Con- 
necticut ; John Rutledge,^ resisting all solicita- 
tions recalling him into the councils of the 
Confederation, had accepted the Chancellorship of 
South Carolina, and was engaged exclusively in 
the discharge of its duties; and even Benjamin 
Franklin, " exempt from public care," found his 
chiefest occupation and a philosophic happiness 

ing that office he, in 1799- 1800, was one of the Envoys Extraordi- 
nary on the famous mission to France. Ellsworth became intimate 
with Prince Talleyrand in Paris. " Mr. Ellsworth," said Talley- 
rand, " how can we establish among our people republican prin- 
ciples and free institutions ,'' " " In the first place, sir," answered 
the Chief Justice, " you must estabhsh a judicial tribunal. Let 
your judges be some of the first men in the nation ; give them 
ample salaries, a hundred thousand francs a year, if necessary ; 
sufficient to set them above the reach of the government. The 
nation will soon find that in that court all have equal rights and 
privileges. Lower courts will easily be established on similar 
principles, and other institutions will follow of course." " I know 
it," replied Talleyrand, " but Frenchmen, Mr. Ellsworth, are 
always in a hurry. They cannot wait such a slow process." (Quoted 
by Mr. Henry Flanders in his Lives of the Chief Justices, vol. 
2> P- 253, from a MSS. memoir of Ellsworth, by Mr. Joseph 
Wood.) He died at Windsor, on the 26th of November, 1807, in 
the sixty-third year of his age. 

^ He was born at Charleston, South Carohna, in September, 
1739, of Irish parentage, educated for the bar at the Temple, 
London ; a member of Congress of the Revolutionary epoch ; Pres- 
ident, and afterwards Governor, of South Carolina ; a member 
of the Congress of the Confederation ; Cliancellor of South Caro- 
lina ; a member of the General Convention of 1787 to form the 
Constitution, and [ist of July, 1795] he was appointed by Presi- 
dent Washington the Chief Justice of the United States. He died 
in his native city, on the i8th July, 1800. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 57 

among the scarce and rich treasures of art, sci- 
ence, and general Hterature which filled every wall, 
nook, and corner of the famous, unpretentious, 
house situate in a garden, up a court off Market 
Street in the city of Philadelphia : there he en- 
tertained, with his wonderful colloquial readiness 
and quaint worldly wisdom, interested and re- 
spectful guests from the enlightened regions of 
the world. It was an epoch so unlike our pres- 
ent days. Personal solicitation for office was then 
unknown. Men were unwilling to occupy re- 
sponsible places unless able, and permitted, to fill 
their offices. 

It was at this meeting at Annapolis that Ham- 
ilton was first brought into familiar intercourse 
and joint public labors with Madison. They had 
met before, and were, for a time, members to- 
gether of the Congress of the Confederation. 
Madison had been a member of the earlier Con- 
gress of the Revolution. At the close of the war 
for independence he went back to his own State, 
and gave the succeeding three years to fostering 
and protecting its trade and its internal improve- 
ments. The purpose, in truth, of the meeting 
affected simply these local matters. Hamilton and 
Madison were aware of what the other thought 
on public questions ; perhaps what each designed. 
They had not been like-minded: were not familiar. 
The name of Hamilton does not occur in Madi- 



158 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

son's correspondence during the time they had 
been fellow-members of Congress. Madison knew 
of the care with which Hamilton formed his opin- 
ions, the tenacity with which he adhered to them, 
and the ardor and ability with which he exposed 
and enforced them. Hamilton stood steadily, and, 
but for Mr. Higginson of Massachusetts, alone 
in the Congress of the Confederation opposed to 
Madison's plan for a general revenue. Hamil- 
ton's imperious and far-seeing wisdom declined to 
weaken, by temporary relief, the necessities which 
required a complete efficiency in a national sys- 
tem. He would not sacrifice the standard of true 
government by accommodating unreasonable jeal- 
ousies of federal authority.-^ Two remarkable 
official papers, relating to that measure, indicate 
the difference in character of these two statesmen. 
The paper of Hamilton to the State of Rhode 
Island, on this occasion, was marked with great 
candor and firmness of opinion as to a federal 
power : it presented " broad and startling doc- 
trines of implication from powers expressly 
granted," and it repeated his favorite doctrines 
of " the beneficial influences of a funding system." 
It will be perceived that the principle of " implied 
powers " is, as we have already intimated, the 
latent genius of the political progress and history 
of the United States of America.^ The paper of 

^ yournals of Congress, vol. 4, pp. 190, 191. * Part I., p. 26. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 59 

Madison, is an address to the States; and shows, 
on the other hand, enlightened caution, much cir- 
cumspection, and a practical daily dealing with 
the precise question of the moment. State pride 
and sovereignty are by it sought to be reconciled 
with the urgent requirements of the Congress 
Virginia became alarmed, at the contention pre- 
sented by Hamilton, in his letter to Rhode Island, 
" that Congress, having a right to borrow and make 
requisitions that were binding on the States, had a 
right also to concert the means for accomplishing 
the end ; " and no persuasion " could induce them 
to adopt the manner recommended by Congress 
for obtaining revenue." ^ Madison strictly dealt 
in those feasible sort of remedies which are im- 
mediately attainable. Hamilton looked beyond 
the passing accommodations of the day, and de- 
sired that necessities, ever recurring, should not 
be relieved in detail and temporarily. Better that 
evils should be endured as spurs to effort for per- 
manent and comprehensive relief : a relief not 
enticed by expedient. It should come as the nat- 
ural and lasting spring of a national, general, and 
efficient system of government. These two men 
were thenceforward to act together in harmoni- 
ous action until their country had received the 
perpetual benefaction of their labors in the form 

1 Manuscript letter from Hon. Joseph Jones to Mr. Madison, 
quoted in Rives' Life of Madison , vol. i, pp. 435, 436. 



l6o ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

of such a government: replete with strength, 
vigor, and beneficence, displaying the skill and 
wisdom with which it was built. -^ 

A comparison of the individuality of Madison 
with that of Hamilton will aid in bringing our sub- 
ject to clearer relief. James Madison was small in 
stature, thick-set, but diminutive and slender in 
the lower limbs ; a penetrating, nervous blue eye ; 
a studious, care-worn expression of face ; slightly 
bald ; a calm, settled manner, suggesting greater 
years than he had reached ; slow and grave in 
speech, adding much to his moral weight and im- 
pressive dignity, whether in debate or in council. 
His eye alone, the writer has been told by those 
who knew him, indicated the close and circum- 
spect nature of his acute, watchful faculty for ob- 
servation. His dress was always of decorous 
black, and he wore his hair powdered after the 
fashion of his time. He was born the sixteenth 
day of March, 1751, on the northern bank of the 
Rappahannock River, in the county of King 
George, Virginia. His father was a large landed 
proprietor, occupied mainly with the management 
of his extensive plantations, and who was, during 
the Revolutionary War, the County Lieutenant: 
an ancient traditional office, derived from the po- 
litical institutions of England. The family was 
among those who founded the Colony of Virginia, 
and their ancestor's name is to be seen in the list 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. l6l 

of the colonists who, in 1623, planted themselves 
on the lands of the Chesapeake. He was edu- 
cated at Princeton College, New Jersey. Among 
his fellow-collegians were Brockholst Livingston, 
the future Associate Justice of the National Su- 
preme Court ; William Bradford, the future Attor- 
ney General in Washington's Administration; and 
Aaron Burr, destined to be the Vice-President of 
the United States and the assassin of Alexander 
Hamilton. Madison was twenty-one years of age 
(1772) when he returned to his father's home. He 
left upon those who were intimate with him at 
college impressions of distinctive characteristics 
of mind, of diligence and care in study, clearness 
of analytical reasoning, lucidity in order, precis- 
ion and comprehensiveness combined, and of a 
terse and felicitous use of his native tongue.^ 
Those were the qualities which, during after years, 
made him noted as a writer, debater, and states- 
man, among his compeers in public life, and are 
especially visible in the papers which he contrib- 
uted to " The Federalist." Though educated for 
the bar, he never made a professional use of such 
attainments. Their effects, however, appear in 
his mode of treating all subjects which he consid- 
ered ; chiefly in showing the influence of authority 
in the formation of opinion. His understanding 
was elevated and sustained by a cultivated taste 

* Life of y antes Madison, by Rives, vol. i, pp. 1-28. 
II 



1 62 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

for philosophical speculations. At one season he 
occupied his hours of leisure by a minute analysis 
of the most important works of Buffon, and works 
in other branches of natural history. He was 
abundant and apt in examples to point and lend 
force to argument.^ Such was James Madison, — 
he who was to be the chief associate of Hamilton 
while the frame of a national government was 
a-building, and whose more cautious disposition 
was to guard the tender enterprise during days 
when the bold and frank spirit of Hamilton refused 
to duck to opposing interests and antipathies. 
Up to the time when they met at Annapolis, 
nothing had come from Madison beyond those 
conceptions which hovered about the trade and 
internal improvements of his own Virginia, and 

^ Mr. Jefferson, in the brief memoir of his own life, says of 
Madison : He " came into the House in 1776, a new member and 
young, which circumstances, concurring with his extreme modesty, 
prevented his venturing himself in debate before his removal to 
the council of state in November, 1777. From thence he went to 
Congress, then consisting of few members. Trained in these suc- 
cessive schools, he acquired a habit of self-possession, which placed 
at ready command the rich resources of his luminous and discrim- 
inating mind, and of his extensive information, and rendered him 
the first of every assembly afterwards of which he became a mem- 
ber. Never wandering from his subject into vain declamation, but 
pursuing it closely in language pure, classical, and copious, sooth- 
ing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness 
of expression, he rose to the eminent station which he held in the 
great national convention of 1787 ; and in that of Virginia, which 
followed, he sustained the new Constitution in all its parts." 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 63 

some moderate measures intended only to amend 
the existing Articles of Confederation. Those 
Articles he had, indeed, thought sufficient in an 
unasserted inherent authority. Jefferson was like- 
minded. But the delinquency of States was open- 
ing the mind of Madison to the degeneracy and 
utter inefficiency of the Confederation. He began 
to think it must be strengthened and amplified. 
Thus it occurred that the want of sympathy, so 
pronounced on the part of the greater number of 
those States not represented at Annapolis, aided 
the ultimate project of Hamilton. It was there 
more fully manifested than ever that the subject 
of simply commercial regulations between States, 
for which the proposed end of this assemblage was 
to devise a uniform plan, could not win the popu- 
lar attention. A project like that which Hamil- 
ton submitted, in 1783, through General Philip 
Schuyler, seemed more wise and more acceptable. 
The express limitation, however, of the delegated 
power to the commissioners presupposed a dep- 
utation from all of the States ; and it had in view 
the trade and commerce of all the States. The 
commissioners, for that reason, prudently con- 
cluded not to proceed on the particular trust of 
their meeting, under the disqualification of so par- 
tial and so defective a representation. Even New 
York lagged behind in its actual representation ; 
for, though James Duane, Robert R. Livingston, 



1 64 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

Egbert Benson, and Robert C. Livingston, were 
appointed with Hamilton, none but Duane at- 
tended with him. Unpromising as this may have 
appeared to those of little faith, yet such an occa- 
sion was too long a-coming, one not likely to recur, 
by which Hamilton's fondly-nursed predilection 
could be so well introduced to the whole country. 
Here his indomitable energy, suavity, and persua- 
sive temper, secured the reflective conference of 
his sagacious fellow members. Madison's specula- 
tions, it is clear, had not gone farther than those 
which concerned a politico-commercial convention. 
But he quickly saw, and his judgment approved, 
the reasons which Hamilton laid before the com- 
missioners for taking the whole subject of the gen- 
eral government into consideration, and the in- 
adequacy of any plan which should consider 
dissociated details, local and transitory in their 
nature. A broader proposal was, indeed, necessary; 
and the thoughts of Madison expanded towards 
the teeming future of his country. What he had 
devised, what he had achieved, all and each, 
were in that right direction, and inclined him to 
value the new and grand domain of a national ex- 
istence. He gave himself to the proposed work of 
strengthening the central political system, by which 
the States could be held together in the pursuit 
of one common and prosperous career. The spell 
of that genius, which Talleyrand acknowledged, 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 65 

admired, and respected, informed and captivated 
Madison ; the wisdom and patriotism which had 
early been received for a " chief and confidential 
aid" by Washington, pervaded and moved the 
assembly. Hamilton's ardor and candor had con- 
quered the way. In after years, when the conten- 
tions of party had excited animosities, Madison still 
bore testimony in favor of the patriotism, truth, 
and honor of Hamilton. Though the junior of 
all present, Hamilton was requested by his conso- 
ciates to prepare a report to their respective States. 
The report was to declare the necessity which was 
felt for extending any revision of the federal system 
to all its defects, and was to recommend the ap- 
pointment of deputies, for that purpose, by the 
legislatures of each of the States, to meet in con- 
vention in the city of Philadelphia, on the second 
day of May, ensuing. A report to this effect was 
drafted by Hamilton. In it he had set forth his 
old favorite scheme for nothing less than " a solid 
coercive union." He thought it neither possible 
nor desirable to revive the lapsed powers of the 
Confederation. The report proposed by Hamilton 
was deemed too bold in purport and too strong in 
tone. Randolph of Virginia, had great influence 
with the commissioners and throughout his own 
State ; and he stoutly declined to adopt it. '^Flam- 
ilton, as usual, was firmly adhering to his own view, 
when Madison advised him : " You had better 



1 66 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

yield to this man, for otherwise all Virginia will be 
against you." The report was modified by Ham- 
ilton to suit the more accommodating temper. His 
chief object was gained ; as the commissioners by 
unanimous action had commended the calling of a 
convention. Thereby attention was to be awakened ; 
the people informed of the dangers which beset 
them ; and they to be invited to send capable men 
— then lapped in the indolent repose of private 
life, or busied exclusively in local affairs, — to an 
assembly for the specific and comprehensive dis- 
cussion of the state of the whole country. The 
Articles of Confederation were to be used as the 
medium, but the People alone to be regarded as 
the source of government. 

Before we recite the words of that address, and 
describe the success which ultimately followed its 
impulse, we will recur to the more personal his- 
tory of Hamilton ; and, with all the particularity 
which authentic records and tradition afford, re- 
trace the incidents of his life from the time when 
he first addressed a public meeting and appeared 
as a writer [1775],^ to the time [1786] when the 
address was issued at Annapolis. We will not 
fail to observe how haply the actual circumstances 
of his busy life, from boyhood up, furnished his 
creative faculties with the experience of practical 
affairs. The variety and excellence of this expe- 

1 Ante, pp. 52, 53 of Part I. 



THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE. 1 67 

rience were rare, and its uses apparent in many im- 
portant acts of his future statesmanship. His 
occupations were certainly numerous and, each in 
succession, various; but he not open to the impu- 
tation of instability. The curse of Reuben was 
not upon him. He excelled. He kept ever in 
view his ambition " to prepare the way for futurity," 
" to exalt his station ; " and, to secure this end, he- 
was willing " to risk his life, though not his charac 
ter."^ This proper regard, at the age of twelve 
years, for the " immediate jewel of the soul," good 
reputation, is not the least among the evidences-of 
his early maturity in intellect and morals. In the 
counting-house; in describing the tornado; in 
college, limiting the duration of the curriculum, 
and with haste, but no hurry, accomplishing its 
purpose of efificiency; in the impromptu speech 
on July 6, 1775, when method, deliberation, 
ardor, and argument united in proclaiming that 
the boy orator was to be a leader of men ; in the 
camp, reading and reflecting profoundly with the 
devotion of a student ; in the military family of 
Washington, performing not only the routine duties 
of secretary, but advising the commander, and 
others, in the highest and most delicate move- 
ments, warlike and diplomatic ; in conceiving and 
organizing projects and plans by which the defects 

^ See the letter to his friend Stevens, referred to already on page 
47, Part I. ; and see Hamilton's Works, vol. i, pp. 1, 2. 



1 68 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

of government might be amended and it made 
effective ; in his speeches in the Congress of the 
Confederation ; in his withholden plan for govern- 
ment; in his deep, recondite, searching into the 
very foundations whereon the principles of political, 
civil, and municipal jurisprudences immutably rest : 
descending to " the grounds and first original 
sources of law ; " ^ — in all these, the rising steps of 
that part of his career which preceded the as- 
sembly at Annapolis, we shall feel, and can but 
wonder at, the excellence of that procession and, 
at length, unity of influences which aided and 
obeyed the dominion of his great natural facul- 
ties. 

To which consideration we next proceed. 

1 " The stateliness of houses, the goodliness of trees, when we 
behold them, delighteth the eye; but that foundation which beareth 
up the one, the root which ministereth unto the other nourishment 
and life, is in the bosom of the earth concealed ; and if there be at 
any time occasion to search into it, such labor is then more neces- 
sary than pleasant, both to them which undertake it and for the 
lookers-on. In like manner, the use and benefit of good laws all 
that live under them may enjoy with delight and comfort, albeit the 
grounds and first original causes from whence they have sprung 
be unknown, as to the greatest part of men they are." — Hooker's 
Ecclesiastical Polity^ book i., section 2. 



^ % 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON 



A HISTORICAL STUDY 



HONORABLE GEORGE SHEA 

CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE MARINE COURT 



NEW YORK 

PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON 

BOSTON: H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY 

CarabriUsc : Cbe EtticrBiUe Prctsc 

1877 



■LIBRARY OF CONGRESS J 



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ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

A HISTORICAL STUDY 

PART II 
THE FOUNDER OF EMPIRE 



HONORABLE GEORGE SHEA 

CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE MARINE COURT 



NEW YORK 

PUBLISHED BY KURD AND HOUGHTON 

BOSTON: H.O.HOUGHTON AND COMPANY 

1878 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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